By SP

Recently Showtime announced that they added another renowned actress to join the upcoming fourth season of The L Word. According to their website, “Ms. Shepherd will portray a married woman with two grown children who suddenly begins questioning her sexuality. She will appear in 11 episodes, starring as an Executive Vice Chancellor of the fictional California University and boss to Jennifer Beals’ character Bette Porter.”

Cybill Shepherd doesn’t need an introduction since her name is well known, so this article will introduced the highlights of her life and career, which are well covered on numerous websites.

Shepherd was born in 1950 in Memphis, Tennessee and as a bright 5-year old girl, she already knew what she wanted in her future. As she mentioned in her mini music autobiography on the website at www.cybill.com, “At five years old, my vocal career began by shouting over my big sister, Terry, as we listened to Elvis sing “Blue Suede Shoes.” Singing around the dinner table and camp songs by the fire led to my audition, at nine, for the choir at Holy Communion Episcopal Church. Eventually I became a featured soloist. My formal training began, at sixteen, studying with the coach of the Metropolitan Opera Chorus when the company was in my home town Memphis, Tennessee.”

But she didn’t stop there. At sixteen, Cybill Shepherd won the 1966 ‘Miss Teenage Memphis’ and began doing some modeling work throughout the high school and after. As part of her new career, Shepherd was working as a cover girl for several fashion magazines. One of the photos attracted film director Peter Bogdanovich who offered Shepherd a role of the teenage ingénue in his movie The Last Picture Show (1971).

According to Wikipedia.com, during the filming of this movie, the 20-year old Shepherd began an affair with Bogdanovich, which lasted of and on for eight years. Also in 1972 Shepherd met Elvis Presley and later she mentioned in her autobiography that they had “a short, uneventful affair … and he was a wonderful lover, very sexy.”

As reported on Starpulse.com, “Except for a part as Charles Grodin's dream girl in The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Shepherd did most of her subsequent early film work for Bogdanovich, once her lover as well as her mentor. Reviewers were barely tolerant of her performance in Daisy Miller (1974) -- and with the next Bogdanovich-directed appearance in At Long Last Love (1975) the gloves were off, her career had hit a hard spot.”

Wikipedia mentions Shepherd’s reaction to the failure of Daisy Miller as she said in her 1987 interview, “It's frustrating to watch now because I've learned so much as an actor, and I would have approached that character so differently.”

In spite of bad reviews, Shepherd quickly recovered and soon appeared in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver (1976), playing opposite to Robert De Niro.

Then followed the series of less successful roles and finally, in 1978, Shepherd announced that she was done with show business and moved back to Memphis, marrying a local auto-parts dealer David Ford the same year. The couple had a daughter in 1980 but after four years together they divorced in 1982.

Shepherd was ready to come back to Hollywood and she landed a role as Maddie Hayes in ABC’s Moonlighting (1985-1989), which jump-started her career again. The series was a combination of mystery and comedy and a natural chemistry between Shepherd and her co-star, Bruce Willis, quickly made them one of the most popular television couples.

Everything seemed perfect on screen but behind the scenes things were not as smooth and entertaining. According to All Movie Guide, “Shepherd and Willis made no secret of their distaste for one another, and both behaved rather boorishly to those around them. Firings and tantrums were almost everyday occurrences on the set, and this, plus the problem of turning out a quality script each week, caused the series to fall woefully behind in schedule. Soon it became a media event if Moonlighting ran something other than a repeat. In 1987, Shepherd became pregnant with twins (after marrying her second husband, chiropractor Bruce Oppenheim. This marriage ended in 1990), which forced a speedup in production and some wildly convoluted (and often tasteless) scripts to accommodate the actress' condition. Power struggles continued between Shepherd and producer Glenn Caron (and the people who replaced Caron) and Moonlighting was cancelled in 1989.”

Still, her role in the series won Shepherd two Golden Globe awards and after her second divorce she became, as Wikipedia put it, “once again a sought-after film actress.” She appeared in several movies, such as Chances Are (1989), Texasville (1990 – a sequel to The Last Picture Show), Alice (1990) and Once Upon a Crime (1992).

In 1995-1998 she stared in a CBS’ sitcom Cybill where she played a title character, which was loosely based on her own life and career. This role won Shepherd her third Golden Globe award in 1997.

She also wrote an autobiography in collaboration with Aimee Lee Ball that was published in 2000 under the title Cybill Disobedience: How I Survived Beauty Pageants, Elvis, Sex, Bruce Willis, Lies, Marriage, Motherhood, Hollywood, and the Irrepressible Urge to Say What I Think.

Shepherd also appeared in two TV movies based on the life of Martha Stewart, where the actress played the title character, Martha, Inc.: The Story of Martha Stewart (2003) and Martha: Behind Bars (2005).

As mentioned on Wikipedia, “throughout her career Cybill Shepherd has been an outspoken activist for such issues as gay rights, abortion rights and other politically relevant topics. She was present at the opening of the National Civil Rights Museum in her hometown of Memphis, for which she lent some financial support.”

The role on The L Word presents Shepherd with another opportunity to stand up for her beliefs by doing what she likes the best – acting.