Candice Bergen didn't always want to be an actress. As the daughter of radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen (he was a ventriloquist on the radio - how could anyone be sure he wasn't moving his lips?), she resisted the idea of a career in show business, preferring to be a clothing designer when she grew up. At one point she was a photojournalist.
But the lure of the family business proved too great. Candice Bergen made her movie debut as a university student in the 1966 movie The Group, and soon after that she played an assistant school teacher in the Steve McQueen naval drama The Sand Pebbles. In the first indication that she was adept at comedy, she appeared in the 1970 political satire The Adventurers, as a frustrated socialite.
Her biggest roles in the seventies were as Susan in 1971's Carnal Knowledge (Susan was the wife of the character played by Art Garfunkel) and as Jessica Potter, a married woman who's been having an affair, in the 1979 Burt Reynolds comedy Starting Over (Reynolds played her husband). She also played the love interest of the widowed Oliver Barrett IV in Oliver's Story, the sequel to Love Story. In between, she became the first woman (and the fourth person overall) to host "Saturday Night Live."
That particular distinction, as it turned out, proved to be a pivotal milestone in Candice Bergen's career.
That particular distinction, as it turned out, proved to be a pivotal milestone in Candice Bergen's career.
Not only did she go on to host "Saturday Night Live" four more times (at one point playing Garth Algar's mother in the ongoing "Wayne's World" sketch series, with Mike Myers' Wayne Campbell character having a crush on her - "Party on, Wayne!"), she found herself signing on to a sitcom about a Washington-based TV newswoman having come out of rehab at the Betty Ford Center in "Murphy Brown," which became the 1990s equivalent of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." A huge hit, "Murphy Brown" ran for ten seasons on CBS beginning in 1988, earning the sort of big ratings that eluded most other CBS shows of the time. She won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series five times during the show's run. Ostensibly still standing for Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS's initials might just as well have stood for "Candice Bergen's Showbox."
She returned to movies in the early two thousand zeroes, appearing in comedies such as Miss Congeniality, Sweet Home Alabama, and a remake of The In-Laws, but she also found time to do another TV series - as lawyer Shirley Schmidt in "Boston Legal."
Married to French movie director Louis Malle (you know My Dinner with Andre? him) from 1980 until his death from cancer in 1995, she married real estate magnate and philanthropist Marshall Rose in 2000.
Candice Bergen continues to thrive as an actress long after skeptics thought she could, no longer able to be dismissed as just Edgar Bergen's beautiful daughter. And she's no longer just an actress. She's an institution. :-)
