Sheila Kelley

Sheila Kelley is an American actress born on October 9, 1963, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, the youngest of nine children. Her mother, Kate, first married Leonard Thom, with whom she had two children; following Thom's death in a train accident in 1950, Kate married mining engineer and inventor Jay Kelley, and together they had seven children, including Sheila.

Kelley pursued dance training at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied ballet, anatomy, and movement physiology. During the period immediately following her freshman year, she was diagnosed with congenital hip dysplasia, which ended her aspirations of a dance career. She redirected her focus to acting, completed her studies at NYU, and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After a period working in public relations, she secured a talent agent, began performing in plays, and co-founded an Off-Off-Broadway theater troupe called The Elephant Company.

Her professional acting career began in television in the 1980s, with her first credited television role in 1987. Her film debut came in 1988 with Some Girls. From 1990 to 1993, she portrayed Gwen Taylor in the legal drama L.A. Law, and she later played Dr. Charlotte "Charley" Bennett Hayes on Sisters. In 1995, Kelley appeared on Broadway in My Thing of Love. Her screen work has spanned numerous guest roles across American television series, as well as recurring roles including Zoe in the final season of Lost in 2010 and Carol Rhodes on Gossip Girl from 2011 to 2012. She also played Debbie Wexler on The Good Doctor, a role that cast her opposite her real-life husband, actor Richard Schiff, whom she married in 1996. The couple have two children, a son named Gus, born in 1994, and a daughter named Ruby, born in August 2000.

In 2000, Kelley appeared in the feature film Dancing at the Blue Iguana, in which she played a stripper and performed a seductive dance routine. Her experience making that film sparked an interest in pole dancing, which she developed into a fitness method she called S Factor. The program incorporates Pilates, yoga, stretching, and pole dance routines, and Kelley expanded it into a national chain of exercise studios, a book titled S Factor: Strip Workouts for Every Woman, instructional DVDs, and a monthly editorial presence on the S Factor website.