Jenny McCarthy
Biography
Jenny
McCarthy has a great personality. Her vivacious charisma, snappy
banter, and amusing facial expressions on MTV's Singled Out, a hyper-charged
nineties version of The Dating Game, made the should-be stupid game
show somehow bearable.
But McCarthy's
show-business attributes extend beyond mere personality--the twenty-three-year-old
former Playboy centerfold exhibits such profound perkiness that
Hollywood producers have ignored her meager rTsumT and inundated
her with proposals for game shows, talk shows, and sitcoms. Just
a few short years ago, in 1992, McCarthy was scrambling for funds
to finance her second year of nursing studies at Southern Illinois
University. She decided to quit school and embark on a modeling
career, only to be told she was too curvy.
She realized
that Playboy prefers full-figured women over waifs, and hand-delivered
photographs of herself to the magazine's Chicago office. The editors
liked what they saw and paid McCarthy $20,000 to pose as Miss October
1993. A few months later, she won the Playmate of the Year title
and $100,000 in cash and prizes. Now a certified babe, McCarthy
moved from her native Chicago--where she grew up with three sisters,
a stay-at-home mom, and her father, a steel-plant foreman--to Los
Angeles in search of stardom. Hollywood auditions proved difficult
to come by, and it took incessant badgering from Ray Manzella, McCarthy's
forty-seven-year-old manager and live-in boyfriend, to land an interview
at MTV.
The network's
producer liked what they saw and hired McCarthy to CO-host Singled
Out, which debuted in the summer of 1995. Funny, photogenic, and
able to manhandle fifty testosterone-swollen contestants without
incurring (or committing) bodily harm, McCarthy was an immediate
success. MTV was eager to retain its hot property and coughed up
a $500,000, one-year contract that promoted McCarthy to full-fledged
VJ and gave her carte blanche to create a program of any format
that best suits her talents.
McCarthy
subsequently bowed out of her host responsibilities on Singled Out
to concentrate her attention on creating a new MTV sketch-variety
series, The Jenny McCarthy Show (in her words, it's "kind of
like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on acid"). She also
developed a sitcom for NBC called Jenny, in which she portrays an
East Coast grocery clerk who inherits a Hollywood mansion. Hey,
it could happen. Playboy, too, was keen to further its relationship
with McCarthy; it offered $500,000 to snap more nude photos. When
McCarthy demurred, claiming that this was not the career path she
was presently pursuing, the magazine settled for rerunning old pictures
Although she also declined proposals from Fox and NBC, McCarthy
is nonetheless venturing beyond teen-oriented cable channels and
gentlemen's magazines.
She appeared
as "blonde nurse" in To Do in Denver When You're Dead
(1995) and, later, portrayed her first substantive screen character
(a neurotic movie star) in The Stupids (1996), opposite Tom Arnold.
It seems McCarthy is heeding and exceeding advice that her mother
proffered years ago: "Be like Vanna White."
Jenny McCarthy Filmography
Dirty Love (2005)--Rebecca
Scary Movie 3 (2003)--Kate
The Perfect You (2002)--Whitney
Thank Heaven (2001)--Julia
Python (2000)--Francesca Garibaldi
Scream 3 (2000)--Sarah Darling
Playboy's Celebrities (1999)
Playmates of the Year: The 90's (1999)--Playmate of the Year, 1994
Diamonds (1999)--Sugar
"The Big Breakfast" (1992) TV Series--Guest Presenter
(1999)
Playboy's Wet & Wild: The Locker Room (1998) (as Jenny Mccarthy)--Featured
Playmate
Taste of Playboy: Personalities Volume 1, A (1998)--1994 Playmate
of the Year
BASEketball (1998)--Yvette Denslow
Playboy: Jenny McCarthy - The Playboy Years (1997)
"Jenny" (1997) TV Series--Jenny McMillan
"The Jenny McCarthy Show" (1997) TV Series--Various
The Best of Jenny McCarthy (1996)--Herself
The Stupids (1996)--Glamorous Actress
"Singled Out" TV Series--Herself (1995-1997)
Playboy Video Playmate Calendar 1995 (1995)--Miss June
Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995)--Blonde Nurse
Wrestlemania XI (1995)--Herself
College Girls (1993) (uncredited)--Photographer |
