Candice Bergen

Biography

Candice Patricia Bergen (born May 9, 1946) is an American actress. She won five Primetime Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards as the title character on the CBS sitcom Murphy Brown (1988–1998, 2018). She is also known for her role as Shirley Schmidt on the ABC drama Boston Legal (2005–2008). In films, Bergen was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Starting Over (1979) and for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Gandhi (1982). Bergen began her career as a fashion model and appeared on the cover of Vogue before she made her screen debut in the film The Group (1966). She starred in The Sand Pebbles (1966), Soldier Blue (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and The Wind and the Lion (1975). She made her Broadway debut in the 1984 play Hurlyburly and starred in the revivals of The Best Man (2012) and Love Letters (2014). From 2002 to 2004, she appeared in three episodes of the HBO series Sex and the City. Her other film roles include Miss Congeniality (2000), Sweet Home Alabama (2002), The Women (2008), Bride Wars (2009), Book Club (2018) and Let Them All Talk (2020).

== Early life == Candice Patricia Bergen was born May 9, 1946, at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles, California. Her mother, Frances Bergen (née Westerman), was a Powers model known professionally as Frances Westcott. Her father, Edgar Bergen, was a ventriloquist, comedian, and actor. Bergen's paternal grandparents were Swedish immigrants who anglicized their surname, which was originally Berggren ("mountain branch"). Bergen was raised in Beverly Hills, California, and attended the Westlake School for Girls. As a child, she was irritated when described as "Charlie McCarthy's little sister" (a reference to her father's star dummy). She began appearing on her father's radio program at a young age and in 1958, at age 11, was a guest with her father on Groucho Marx's quiz show You Bet Your Life, as Candy Bergen. She said she wanted to be a clothing designer when she grew up. She later attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she was elected Homecoming Queen and Miss University, but as Bergen later acknowledged, she did not take her education seriously. Bergen was a classmate of future President Donald Trump, who asked her out, but according to him, she declined his invitation. She later stated she did go on a date with him once, but was back home at 9 PM and that "it was really a dud." After failing two courses in art and opera, she was asked to leave at the end of her sophomore year. She ultimately received an honorary doctorate from Penn in May 1992. Before taking up acting, Bergen was a fashion model and was featured on Vogue covers. She received acting training at HB Studio in New York City.

== Career ==

=== Early work === Bergen made her screen debut playing a university student in the ensemble film The Group (1966), directed by Sidney Lumet, who knew Bergen's family. The film delicately touched on the subject of lesbianism and was a critical and financial success. Afterwards, Bergen left college to focus on her career. She played the role of Shirley Eckert, an assistant school teacher, in The Sand Pebbles (1966) with Steve McQueen. The movie, made for 20th Century Fox, was nominated for several Academy Awards and was a financial success. She guest-starred on an episode of Coronet Blue, whose director Sam Wanamaker recommended her for the comedy The Day the Fish Came Out (1967), which was directed by Michael Cacoyannis and distributed by Fox. The film was a box-office flop; nevertheless, Fox signed her to a long-term contract.

=== Films === Bergen was announced for the role of Anne in Valley of the Dolls, but did not appear in the film. Bergen went to France to appear in Claude Lelouch's romantic drama Live for Life (1967) opposite Yves Montand, popular in France but not the US. In 1968, she played the leading female role in The Magus, a British mystery film for Fox starring Michael Caine and Anthony Quinn that was almost universally ridiculed and was another major flop. She played a frustrated socialite in a 1970 political satire, The Adventurers, based on a novel by Harold Robbins. Her salary was $200,000. The film received negative reviews, and while it did respectably at the box office, it did not help her career. Bergen called it a "movie out of the 1940s." Bergen played Elliott Gould's girlfriend in Getting Straight (1970), a counterculture movie which drew another spate of bad reviews but was commercially profitable. She said it took her career in "a new direction... my first experience with democratic, communal movie making." She also starred in the controversial Western Soldier Blue (1970), an overseas success but a failure in America. The film's European success led to Bergen's being voted by British exhibitors as the seventh-most popular star at the British box office in 1971. Bergen appeared with Oliver Reed and Gene Hackman in The Hunting Party (1971), a violent Western which drew terrible reviews and flopped. Bergen received some strong reviews for her supporting role in Carnal Knowledge (1971), directed by Mike Nichols. She then had the lead role in the drama T.R. Baskin (1971) and earned the best reviews of her career up to that time. She described the latter as the first role "that is really sort of a vehicle, where I have to act and not just be a sort of decoration" saying she had decided "it was time for me to get serious about acting." Bergen was absent from screens for a few years. She returned with a supporting part in a British heist film, 11 Harrowhouse (1974), then did a Western with Gene Hackman and James Coburn, Bite the Bullet (1975). Both films were modest successes. In 1975, she replaced Faye Dunaway at the last minute to co-star with Sean Connery in The Wind and the Lion (1976), as a strong-willed American widow kidnapped in the Moroccan desert. The film drew mixed reviews and broke even at the box office. Bergen was reunited with Hackman in The Domino Principle (1977) for Stanley Kramer, another failure. She appeared in A Night Full of Rain (1978) for Lina Wertmüller and was the love interest of Ryan O'Neal's character in the Love Story sequel, Oliver's Story (1978), but both films failed critically and financially. Bergen appeared with Burt Reynolds in the romantic comedy Starting Over (1979), for which she received Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for best supporting actress. She portrayed a best-selling author in Rich and Famous (1981) with Jacqueline Bisset. A remake of the Bette Davis film Old Acquaintance; the film was not a success. In 1982, Bergen appeared in the Oscar-winning film Gandhi in which she portrayed documentary photographer Margaret Bourke-White. Bergen was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

=== Television and other work === Beginning in the 1970s, Bergen became a frequent guest host of Saturday Night Live. She was the first woman to host the show, and the first host to do a second show. She was also the first woman to join the Five-Timers Club when she hosted for the fifth time in 1990. In recent years, Bergen has made various cameos on SNL, often to help welcome new members into the Five-Timers Club, such as Jonah Hill in 2018, John Mulaney in 2022, Emma Stone in 2023, and Jack Black in 2026. Bergen also guest-starred on The Muppet Show in its first season, while her father Edgar would guest-star the following season. In 1984, Bergen joined the Broadway cast of Hurlyburly. On television, Bergen appeared as Morgan Le Fay in Merlin and the Sword (1985) and in the miniseries Hollywood Wives (1985). She was Burt Reynolds' romantic interest in Stick (1985), and for TV appeared in Murder: By Reason of Insanity (1985) and Mayflower Madam (1987). She portrayed an editor of Vogue on Sex and the City. Her daughter, Chloe Malle, joined the magazine in 2011 and became the head of editorial in 2024. Malle was named editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine by Anna Wintour on September 1, 2025, replacing Wintour who has been in the role since 1988.

=== Murphy Brown === In 1988, she took the lead role in the sitcom Murphy Brown, in which she played a tough television reporter. This provided her with the opportunity to show her little-seen comic talent. The series made frequent reference to politicians and political issues of the day; though it was primarily a conventional sitcom, the show tackled important issues. For example, Brown was a recovering alcoholic who became a single mother and later battled breast cancer. In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized prime-time TV for showing the Murphy Brown character "mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice." Quayle's disparaging remarks were subsequently written into the show, with Brown shown watching Quayle's speech in disbelief at his insensitivity and ignorance of the reality of the lives of single mothers. A subsequent episode explored the subject of family values within a diverse set of families. The Brown character arranges for a truckload of potatoes to be dumped in front of Quayle's residence, an allusion to an infamous incident in which Quayle erroneously directed a school child to spell the word "potato" as "potatoe". In reality, Bergen agreed with at least some of Quayle's observations, saying that while the particular remark was "an arrogant and uninformed posture", as a whole, it was "a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did." Bergen's run on Murphy Brown was extremely successful. The show ran for ten seasons; between 1989 and 1998, Bergen was nominated for an Emmy Award seven times and won five. After her fifth win, she declined future nominations for the role.

=== Post-Murphy Brown ===