Candice Bergen

Candice Patricia Bergen, born May 9, 1946, at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles, California, is an American actress whose career has spanned film, television, and Broadway. Raised in Beverly Hills, she attended the Westlake School for Girls before enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was elected Homecoming Queen and Miss University. After failing two courses and being asked to leave at the end of her sophomore year, she pursued modeling and acting. She later received an honorary doctorate from Penn in May 1992. Her father, Edgar Bergen, was a ventriloquist, comedian, and actor, and her mother, Frances Bergen, was a Powers model known professionally as Frances Westcott. Bergen's paternal grandparents were Swedish immigrants who had anglicized the family surname from Berggren. As a child, Bergen appeared on her father's radio program and in 1958, at age eleven, was a guest alongside him on Groucho Marx's quiz show You Bet Your Life. Before pursuing acting, she worked as a fashion model and appeared on the cover of Vogue. She subsequently trained at HB Studio in New York City.

Bergen made her screen debut in the ensemble film The Group (1966), directed by Sidney Lumet, and the same year appeared in The Sand Pebbles alongside Steve McQueen, playing an assistant schoolteacher named Shirley Eckert. That film was nominated for several Academy Awards and performed well at the box office. Her subsequent film work in the late 1960s included Claude Lelouch's Live for Life (1967) opposite Yves Montand and The Magus (1968), a British mystery film starring Michael Caine and Anthony Quinn. In 1970 she appeared in the political satire The Adventurers, for which she earned a salary of $200,000, and in the counterculture film Getting Straight opposite Elliott Gould. That same year she starred in the controversial Western Soldier Blue, which found greater success overseas than in the United States; its European performance led British exhibitors to rank Bergen as the seventh-most popular star at the British box office in 1971.

Bergen received strong notices for her supporting role in Mike Nichols's Carnal Knowledge (1971) and earned the best reviews of her career to that point for her lead performance in T.R. Baskin (1971). After a period away from screens, she returned with supporting roles in 11 Harrowhouse (1974) and Bite the Bullet (1975), then stepped in at the last minute to replace Faye Dunaway opposite Sean Connery in The Wind and the Lion (1975), playing a strong-willed American widow kidnapped in the Moroccan desert. Her most acclaimed film work of the decade came with Starting Over (1979), a romantic comedy with Burt Reynolds that earned her both an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In 1982 she appeared in the Oscar-winning film Gandhi, portraying documentary photographer Margaret Bourke-White, a performance that brought her a BAFTA Award nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

Bergen made her Broadway debut in 1984 in the play Hurlyburly. She returned to the stage in the 2012 revival of The Best Man and again in 2014 for Love Letters, rounding out a Broadway career that stretched three decades.

On television, Bergen became a defining presence through her starring role as the title character on the CBS sitcom Murphy Brown, which ran from 1988 to 1998 and was revived in 2018. The role earned her five Primetime Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. She subsequently joined the cast of the ABC drama Boston Legal, playing attorney Shirley Schmidt from 2005 to 2008. Between 2002 and 2004, she appeared in three episodes of the HBO series Sex and the City, portraying an editor of Vogue. Her film work in the 2000s and beyond included Miss Congeniality (2000), Sweet Home Alabama (2002), The Women (2008), Bride Wars (2009), Book Club (2018), and Let Them All Talk (2020).

Bergen also became closely associated with Saturday Night Live, becoming the first woman to host the program and the first host to return for a second appearance. She was likewise the first woman to join the show's Five-Timers Club when she hosted for the fifth time in 1990. In subsequent years she made cameo appearances on the program to welcome new members into the Five-Timers Club, including Jonah Hill in 2018, John Mulaney in 2022, and Emma Stone in 2023. Her daughter, Chloe Malle, joined Vogue magazine in 2011 and became the publication's head of editorial in 2024.