| 7th | Top people from Fort Wayne, Indiana |
| 31st | Top Northwestern University alumni |
| Shelley Long | |
|---|---|
| Born | Shelley Lee Long August 23, 1949 Fort Wayne, Indiana United States |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1975–present |
| Spouse(s) | Bruce Tyson (1981-2004) |
Shelley Lee Long (born August 23, 1949) is an American actress best known for her role as Diane Chambers in the popular sitcom Cheers, for which she won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress and two Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress.
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Long was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana at 7:00 A.M. on Tuesday, August 23, 1949. The daughter of Evandine, a school teacher, and Leland Long, who worked in the rubber industry before becoming a teacher.[1] She was active on her high school speech team, competing in the Indiana High School Forensic Association, and in 1967 she won the National Forensic League National Championship in Original Oratory. She delivered a speech on the need for sex education in high school entitled "Sex Perversion Weed."[2] After graduating from South Side High School in Fort Wayne, she studied drama at Northwestern University, but left before graduating to pursue a career in acting and modelling. Her first break as an actress occurred when she began doing commercials in the Chicago area for a furniture company called Homemakers.
In Chicago, she joined The Second City comedy troupe, and in 1975, she began writing, producing, and co-hosting the television program Sorting It Out. The local NBC broadcast went on to win three Emmy Awards for Best Entertainment Show. Her first notable role came in the 1979 television movie The Cracker Factory, in which she portrayed a psychiatric inmate, opposite Natalie Wood. The following year she appeared in A Small Circle of Friends with Brad Davis and Karen Allen. The film about social unrest at Harvard University during the 1960s was a critical success. In 1981, she played the role of Tala in the Ringo Starr film Caveman, starring opposite Dennis Quaid.
She was also featured as Belinda in Ron Howard's comedy Night Shift (co-starring Henry Winkler and Michael Keaton), about life working on the night shift at a city morgue, and starred with Tom Cruise in the 1983 comedy film Losin' It.
Although she had been in feature films, Long became famous as the character Diane Chambers in the long-running television sitcom Cheers. The show was slow to capture an audience but eventually became one of the most popular on the air and made Long a sought-after actress for films.
In 1984, she was nominated for a Best Leading Actress Golden Globe for her performance in Irreconcilable Differences. She then appeared in a series of comedies, such as The Money Pit starring Tom Hanks (1986), Outrageous Fortune with Bette Midler and Peter Coyote (1987) and Hello Again with Corbin Bernsen (1987).
At the height of her fame yet amid much controversy that is still strongly attached to the show, Long left Cheers after Season 5 in 1987. In the Cheers biography documentary, costar Ted Danson admitted there was tension between them but "never at a personal level and always at a work level" due to their different modes of working. He also stated that Long was a lot more like her character than she'd like to admit, but also said that her performances often "carried the show."Long said in later interviews that in her decision to leave it never crossed her mind that she was going to 'sabotage a show' and that she felt the rest of the cast could go it without her. In later documentaries about the show, some cast and crew including Jean Kasem and the shows make up artist talked of Long been difficult on set and claimed she was constantly in conflict with everyone on set. A costar in the documentary said 'it wasn't Shelley versus Ted, it wasn't Shelley versus the cast, it wasn't Shelley versus the crew, it was Shelley versus everyone'.
In a 2003 interview on The Graham Norton Show, Long said she left for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was her desire to spend more time with her newborn daughter.
Her first post-Cheers project was Troop Beverly Hills, a comedy in which she played a housewife who starts a "Wilderness Girl" troop as a distraction from her divorce proceedings.
Long took several roles, such as Don't Tell Her It's Me and Frozen Assets, that turned out to be commercially unsuccessful.
In 1992, she appeared in Fatal Memories: The Eileen Franklin Story, a fact-based television drama about a woman who remembers, later in life, the childhood trauma of being raped by her father and his cronies, and witnessing his murdering her childhood friend to prevent the child from "telling on him." The still controversial "recovered memories" basis for the prosecution resulted in the conviction and sentence of life imprisonment of George Franklin, Sr., a conviction that was later overturned.
In 1993, the actress returned to Cheers for its series finale. She also starred in the short lived sitcom Good Advice with Treat Williams and Teri Garr, but the show was canceled after two seasons. She later resurfaced as Diane for an episode of the spinoff series Frasier.
Long achieved her greatest success in quite a while as mom Carol Brady in the 1995 hit film The Brady Bunch Movie, a campy take on the popular television show. In 1996, she reprised her role in A Very Brady Sequel, which had more modest success.
A series of ventures followed such as the made for TV remake of Freaky Friday, and the family sitcom Kelly Kelly, which only lasted for a few episodes. She played the Wicked Witch of the Beanstalk in a 1997 episode of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.
In 2000, Long took a supporting role in a Richard Gere film, Dr. T and the Women, directed by Robert Altman. She later returned for a third go-around as Carol Brady in The Brady Bunch in the White House.
She played Mitzi Robinson in the 2005 independent film Trust Me. In the early and mid 2000s, Long guest-starred on several sitcoms such as 8 Simple Rules where she played John Ratzenberger's (her old Cheers co-star) wife, and Yes, Dear where she and Alan Thicke portrayed a snobby couple interested in buying the house next door to Greg and Kim.
In October 2009, she appeared on an episode of the TV Show Modern Family as Ed O'Neill's ex-wife.
In 1979, Long met securities broker Bruce Tyson. They married in 1981 and had a daughter Juliana on March 27, 1985. Long and Tyson separated in 2003 and divorced in 2004. In November 2004 Long was rushed to the hospital after an overdose of painkillers.[3]
As part of her comeback, in January 2009, Long is scheduled to open the San Francisco company of the musical Wicked as Madame Morrible for a limited engagement.
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Shelley Long (born 1949-08-23) is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning American actress and comedienne.
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