One cool and eternally classy lady, Candice Bergen was poised for prim and trendy "ice princess" stardom when she first arrived on screen, but she continued to belie that image throughout the radical 1960s and 1970s both on- and off-camera. A staunch feminist, she went on to take a sizeable portion of these contradicting qualities to film and, most particularly, TV.The daughter of famed ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and former actress and "Chesterfield Girl" Frances Bergen, the Beverly Hills born and bred beauty lived amongst the Hollywood glamour and glitter from day one. She made her radio debut on her father's show at the age of 6. Of extreme privilege, she attended Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles, the Cathedral School in Washington D.C. and then abroad to the Montesano (finishing) School in Switzerland. Although she began taking art history and creative drawing at the University of Pennsylvania, she did not graduate due to poor grades. In between studies she also worked as a Ford model in order to buy cameras for her new passion--photography.Perfect for Ivy League patrician roles, Candice made her film debut while still a college student playing the lesbian Vassar-like collegiate of Sidney Lumet's The Group (1966) in an ensemble that included the debuts of other lovely up-and-comers including Joan Hackett and Joanna Pettet. Various films came her way, both here and especially abroad (spurred on by her love for travel), but other than her terrific roles as the co-ed who comes between Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel in Carnal Knowledge (1971) and her prim American kidnapped by Sean Connery in The Wind and the Lion (1975), her performances were deemed too aloof or wan to stand out among the crowd. During this time, she also found a passionate second career as a photographer and photojournalist. A number of her works went on to appear in an assortment of magazines including Life, Playboy and Esquire.Most of her 1970s films were generally dismissed, which included the campus comedy _Getting Straight' opposite the hip counter-culture star at the time-- 'Elliot Gould' ; the violence-soaked drama Soldier Blue (1970); the epic bomb The Adventurers (1970); T.R. Baskin (1971); Bite the Bullet (1975); The Domino Principle (1977), Lina Wertmüller's long-winded and notoriously long-titled Italian dramatic Fine del mondo nel nostro solito letto in una notte piena di pioggia, La (1978) [The End of the World in Our Usual Bend in a Night Fall of Rain]; and the inferior sequel to the huge box office soaper Love Story (1970), entitled Oliver's Story (1978) alongside original star Ryan O'Neal. Things picked up toward the end of the decade when the seemingly humorless Candice took a swipe at comedy. She made history as the first female guest host of "Saturday Night Live," and then showed an equally amusing side in the dramedy Starting Over (1979) as Burt Reynolds tone-deaf ex-wife, enjoying an Oscar nomination for "best supporting actress" in the process. She and Jacqueline Bisset made a fine team as well in George Cukor's Rich and Famous (1981), in which mother Frances could be glimpsed in a Malibu party scene. She also made her Broadway debut in 1985 replacing Sigourney Weaver in David Rabe's black comedy _Hurlyburly."In 1980 Candice married the older (by 14 years) French director Louis Malle. They had one child, Chloe. In 1988, Candice hit a new career plateau on comedy television as the spiky title role on "Murphy Brown" (1988), as the acerbic, competitive, self-important anchor/reporter of a TV magazine show. With a superlative supporting cast, the long-lasting CBS sitcom went the distance (ten seasons) and earned Candice a whopping five Emmy and two Golden Globe awards. A number of TV-movie roles came as a result, playing a number of colorful roles ranging from evil Morgan Le Fey to an elite, high-classed madam.Malle's illness and subsequent death from cancer in 1995 kept Candice at a lower profile for quite some time. Since then, however, Candice has returned with a renewed vigor (or vinegar) on TV, enjoying a number of characters that seem to be familiar extensions of her Murphy Brown curmudgeon. In mostly lightweight comedies such as Miss Congeniality (2000), Sweet Home Alabama (2002) and _In-Laws, The (2003). She also joined the cast of _"Boston Legal" (2002)_ in 2005 playing a brash, no-nonsense lawyer who trades barbs with William Shatner and earning an Emmy nomination in 2006. Her second husband since 2000, Marshall Rose, is a Manhattan real estate developer.
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