| Bebe Neuwirth | ||||||||||
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 At the 2006 Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS Annual Grand Auctionn and Flea Market |
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| Birth name | Beatrice Neuwirth | |||||||||
| Born | December 31 1958 Princeton, New Jersey, U.S. |
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Beatrice "Bebe" Neuwirth (born December 31, 1958) is an Emmy Award- and Tony Award-winning American theater, television, and film actress and singer/dancer.
Contents |
Biography
Early life
Neuwirth was born in Princeton, New Jersey, the daughter of Sydney Anne, an artist, and Lee Paul Neuwirth, a mathematician.[1] Neuwirth is Jewish[2] and attended the Chapin School of Princeton. She began to study dance at the age of five, and chose it as her field of concentration when she attended Juilliard in New York City in 1976 and 1977. During this period, she performed with the Princeton Ballet Company in Peter and the Wolf, The Nutcracker, and Coppelia and appeared in community theater musicals.
Career
Neuwirth made her Broadway debut in the role of Sheila in A Chorus Line in 1980. She has been featured in revivals of Little Me (1982) Sweet Charity (1986), for which she received a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, and Damn Yankees (1994). It was with the 1996 revival of Chicago, in which she starred as showgirl and killer Velma Kelly, that she gained her greatest stage recognition. Her performance garnered her Tony and Drama Desk Awards as Best Lead Actress in a Musical. She voiced Binky in the series of CyberChase. In 2004 she mounted a show, "Here Lies Jenny", that featured songs by Kurt Weill, sung and danced by Neuwirth and a four-person supporting cast, as part of an unspoken ambiguous story in an anonymous seedy bar possibly in Berlin in the 1930s. This show was performed in the Zipper Theater on W. 37 St. in New York, initially only at 11 PM on weekends; it was eventually expanded to include an earlier show weekend evenings also. Here lies Jenny was also presented by Ms. Neuwirth in San Francisco in 2005. On December 31, 2006, her forty-eighth birthday, Neuwirth returned to the still-running Broadway production of Chicago, this time in the role of Roxie Hart. Her screen credits include Green Card (with Andie MacDowell and Gérard Depardieu), Bugsy (with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening), Say Anything, Jumanji (with Robin Williams), Summer of Sam, Barry Levinson's Liberty Heights, Tadpole (for which the Seattle Film Critics named her Best Supporting Actress), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and Woody Allen's Celebrity. Among television viewers, Neuwirth is best known as Dr. Lilith Sternin, the conservatively dressed and emotionally repressed psychiatrist who married Dr. Frasier Crane on the hit comedy series Cheers, in which she appeared from 1986 to 1993. She won two Emmy Awards for the role, in 1990 and 1991. The character also made an appearance in the series Wings and eleven episodes of the Cheers spin-off Frasier, which garned her a 1995 Emmy Award nomination as Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series. Her additional small-screen credits include three shortlived dramatic series, Deadline in 2000, Hack in 2003 and Law & Order: Trial by Jury in 2005. She has appeared as herself in episodes of Will and Grace, Strangers with Candy, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Celebrity Jeopardy!.
References
External links
- Bebe Neuwirth at the Internet Movie Database
- Bebe Neuwirth at the Internet Broadway Database
- Bebe Neuwirth at TV.com
- Bebe Neuwirth article at Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki
- Bebe Neuwirth - Downstage Center interview at American Theatre Wing.org
- Star File: Bebe Neuwirth at Broadway.com
| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Leilani Jones for Grind |
Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical 1986 for Sweet Charity |
Succeeded by Frances Ruffelle for Les Miséables |
| Preceded by Donna Murphy for The King and I |
Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical 1997 for Chicago |
Succeeded by Natasha Richardson for Cabaret |
