Cybill Shepherd

Cybill Lynne Shepherd, born February 18, 1950, in Memphis, Tennessee, is an American actress, singer, and former model whose career has spanned film, television, and stage. The second of three children, she has an older sister, Terry, and a younger brother, William. Her first name was created by combining the names of her grandfather Cy and her father Bill. While a student at East High School, she won the Miss Teenage Memphis title and represented the city at the 1966 Miss Teenage America pageant at age 16, taking home the congeniality award. At 18, she competed in the 1968 Model of the Year contest, which led to fashion modeling work. A 1970 Glamour magazine cover she appeared on caught the attention of director Peter Bogdanovich, who cast her as Jacy Farrow in The Last Picture Show (1971), a coming-of-age drama that also starred Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms. The film earned eight Academy Award nominations and won two, and Shepherd received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance.

Her next major film role came in Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid (1972), written by Neil Simon, in which she played Kelly, a young woman with whom Charles Grodin's character becomes infatuated while on his honeymoon in Miami. That same year she posed as a Kodak Girl for the camera manufacturer's store poster displays. In 1974, Shepherd reunited with Bogdanovich for the title role in Daisy Miller, an adaptation of the Henry James novella set in Europe, though the film was a box office failure. That year she also released a studio album, Cybill Does It...To Cole Porter, on MCA Records. In 1975, she appeared in At Long Last Love, another Bogdanovich film musical that received strongly negative reviews. She recovered critical standing with her supporting role as Betsy, a presidential campaign volunteer, in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), opposite Robert De Niro.

Following a period of less prominent film work, including a 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes, Shepherd pursued stage experience outside New York and Los Angeles at the encouragement of Orson Welles, relocating to her hometown of Memphis to work in regional theatre. In 1981, she appeared in Vanities, a play directed by Orson Bean and staged in St. Louis, Missouri. She returned to New York in 1982 to tour in Lunch Hour by Jean Kerr alongside James MacArthur. The following year she was cast as Colleen Champion in the NBC drama The Yellow Rose (1983), opposite Sam Elliott, a critically praised series that ran for one season.

Shepherd's television career reached a defining moment when she was cast as Maddie Hayes on the detective comedy-drama Moonlighting (1985–1989), opposite Bruce Willis, a co-star she was involved in selecting. The series earned her two Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy, out of three nominations in that category. She starred in Chances Are (1989) with Robert Downey Jr. and Ryan O'Neal, and reprised her role as Jacy in Texasville (1990), the sequel to The Last Picture Show, reuniting the original cast and director. She appeared in Woody Allen's Alice (1990) and Eugene Levy's Once Upon a Crime (1992). From 1995 to 1998, she starred as Cybill Sheridan on the sitcom Cybill, a character loosely modeled on her own life, including portrayals of two ex-husbands and a teenage daughter. The role brought her a third Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy, which she received in 1997.

In 2000, Shepherd published her autobiography, Cybill Disobedience, written in collaboration with Aimee Lee Ball. That same year she hosted a short-lived syndicated talk show based on Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, departing in early 2001. She guest-starred on 8 Simple Rules in 2003 as the sister of Katey Sagal's character, and portrayed Martha Stewart in two television films: Martha, Inc.: The Story of Martha Stewart (2003) and Martha: Behind Bars (2005). From 2007 through the series finale, she played Phyllis Kroll on The L Word across the show's final three seasons. Beginning in 2008, she joined Psych as Madeleine Spencer, the mother of the main character, a role she continued through 2013. She appeared in the 2010 television film The Client List alongside Jennifer Love Hewitt, then played Linette Montgomery in the 2012–2013 series based on that film.

In July 2012, Shepherd made her Broadway debut in the revival of Gore Vidal's The Best Man at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, appearing alongside James Earl Jones, John Stamos, John Larroquette, Kristin Davis, and Elizabeth Ashley. Her later screen work includes Do You Believe? (2015), the direct-to-cable film Being Rose (2017), and the 2023 Lifetime film How to Murder Your Husband: The Nancy Brophy Story, in which she portrayed Nancy Brophy.