1. Elizabeth Berkley is an American actress and producer.
41 Facts About Elizabeth Berkley
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Elizabeth Berkley played Jessie Spano in the Saved by the Bell television franchise and Nomi Malone in the controversial 1995 Paul Verhoeven film Showgirls.
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Elizabeth Berkley had supporting roles in the box office hits The First Wives Club and Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, as well as in Woody Allen's period comedy The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Dylan Kidd's critically acclaimed Roger Dodger.
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Elizabeth Berkley hosted Bravo's talent show Step It Up and Dance and in 2011 she published the New York Times best-seller Ask-Elizabeth, a self-help book for adolescent girls, which drew from the workshops she conducted for her Ask-Elizabeth program.
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Elizabeth Berkley was born in Farmington Hills, Michigan to Jere and Fred Berkley.
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Elizabeth Berkley's mother was a gift-basket business owner and her father was a lawyer.
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Elizabeth Berkley's family is Jewish and she was raised in a Conservative Jewish household, celebrating her bat mitzvah at Beth Abraham Hillel Moses in West Bloomfield.
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Elizabeth Berkley was born with partial heterochromia iridium, a condition of differently colored irises; her right eye is half green and half brown and her left eye is green.
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At age four, Berkley began taking jazz and tap lessons with Barbara Fink of Miss Barbara's Dance Center in Detroit and later took ballet classes with the professional company Dance Detroit.
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Elizabeth Berkley danced Swan Lake with principals from the American Ballet Theatre and for five years she performed in the New York City Ballet holiday production of The Nutcracker in Detroit.
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Elizabeth Berkley continued her training with the Detroit-based company Actors Alliance and starred in two plays, Twain by the Tale and Raft of the Medusa.
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Elizabeth Berkley ventured into modeling, initially doing print work for Hudson's and other regional outlets and later appearing in TV commercials for department stores in Atlanta, Milwaukee and Canada.
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Elizabeth Berkley commuted to Los Angeles on every school break and summer vacation, taking acting classes with Diana Hill and Nora Eckstein of the recently established Young Actors Space and landing roles in Silver Spoons and the WonderWorks TV film Frog.
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The transition from small to big screen turned out to be a difficult one, though, and Elizabeth Berkley worked mainly for television for the following two years, landing roles in Baywatch, Step by Step, Raven, Diagnosis: Murder, Burke's Law and Crossroads.
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Once the casting announcement was official, Elizabeth Berkley signed with Creative Artists Agency and began an intensive 12-week rehearsal period with choreographer Marguerite Derricks and the dance ensemble hired for the film.
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Elizabeth Berkley's performance was particularly targeted: Todd McCarthy described it in Variety as "harsh, graceless and quickly tiresome", and Barbara Shulgasser of the San Francisco Examiner, after comparing her to a Barbie doll, added: "That Elizabeth Berkley cannot act is indisputable".
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Elizabeth Berkley was later awarded two Razzie Awards as Worst Actress of the Year and Worst New Star.
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Elizabeth Berkley briefly returned to television when she starred in the HBO thriller Random Encounter and in one episode of the anthology series Perversions of Science.
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Elizabeth Berkley then starred in the psychological drama Last Call, by Chilean director Christine Lucas and in Malcolm Ingram's road movie Tail Lights Fade, but neither film was able to find theatrical distribution in the US.
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Elizabeth Berkley managed to exhibit her musical talents anyway, by taking part in the 2001 Divas Simply Singing annual benefit concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, where she sang a rendition of the song Fever.
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In 2008, Elizabeth Berkley signed on to appear in a multi-episode arc in the sixth season of CSI: Miami, portraying Julia Winston, Horatio Caine's ex-lover and mother of his teenage son.
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All the episodes featuring Elizabeth Berkley ranked in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings chart and Elizabeth Berkley's role ended appearing in four episodes, including the season finale, before being confirmed for the following season.
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Elizabeth Berkley made a cameo appearance in the independent comedy Women in Trouble and starred in the direct-to-video film S Darko, where she played Trudy, a born-again Christian woman who becomes infatuated with her pastor.
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Elizabeth Berkley played Kelly Wentworth, a straight woman who had a romantic relationship with Jennifer Beals' character Bette Porter, during college.
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In 2011, shortly after completing her national tour to promote her first book Ask-Elizabeth, Berkley played the lead role in the Hallmark Channel original film Lucky Christmas, about a struggling mother who wins the lottery but must recover her ticket from the glove compartment of her stolen car.
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In September 2013, Elizabeth Berkley accepted an offer to participate as a contestant in the 17th season of Dancing with the Stars, where she partnered with Valentin Chmerkovskiy.
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Elizabeth Berkley played the title role in Greg Lauren's short film The Fashion Designer, part of Six01 Studio's installation The Blackout, depicting New York archetypes.
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On November 22,2021, Elizabeth Berkley joined Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye, Lily-Rose Depp, Suzanna Son, Steve Zissis, Anne Heche, Juliebeth Gonzalez and Troye Sivan in Sam Levinson's upcoming HBO series The Idol.
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In 2024 Elizabeth Berkley returned to the big screen, playing the opening victim in Max Minghella's Shell, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
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Elizabeth Berkley filmed her scenes on the final day of production for both Ralph Macchio and Courtney Henggeler in Atlanta.
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In 2006, Elizabeth Berkley began facilitating small interactive self-esteem workshops with teen girls all around the United States.
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Amy Bailey, vice president of development in MTV's News and Documentaries division, said Elizabeth Berkley approached MTV with the idea.
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However, in 2011, Berkley put together the 15 most frequently asked questions from the workshops and published Ask-Elizabeth through the Penguin Group.
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Elizabeth Berkley is married to former actor, artist and fashion designer Greg Lauren, nephew of Ralph Lauren and son of Jerry Lauren, at the time executive vice president of men's design at Polo Ralph Lauren.
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Elizabeth Berkley formally changed her name to Elizabeth Berkley Lauren, and often uses it professionally.
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Elizabeth Berkley previously dated actor and screenwriter Roger Wilson from 1997 to 1999.
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Elizabeth Berkley is good friends with actresses Ele Keats, Jennifer Beals and Carla Gugino.
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Elizabeth Berkley is a vegetarian, and she doesn't smoke or drink alcohol.
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Elizabeth Berkley later took part in other charity events by the organization.
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Elizabeth Berkley spoke of the fur-free issue as one close to her heart since her childhood, when she first realized how unnecessary and cruel it is to take fur from animals in order to satisfy human vanity.
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Elizabeth Berkley has supported the work of other charities and organizations including the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS foundation and the Motion Picture Home for the Aging.