Catherine
Bell (born August 14, 1968 in London, England) is an American
actress known for her role of Lt. Colonel Sarah MacKenzie of the
television show JAG from 1995 to 2005. Recently she has starred
in the Lifetime Television hit series Army Wives as Denise Sherwood.
Catherine Bell is the daughter of an Iranian
mother and a Scottish father. Her parents divorced, and then
she and her mother moved
to Los Angeles,
California, when she was three years old. She became a naturalized
citizen of the United States at the age of 12. She acted in various
television advertisements as a child. She attended the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with an interest in becoming either
a biomedical engineer or a physician but dropped out to become a full-time
model. One of her first modeling jobs was an extended assignment in
Japan. When she returned to California, she studied acting at the Beverly
Hills Playhouse with Milton Katselas. Her first television acting role
was one line on the sitcom "Sugar and Spice" (1990).
Catherine Bell made her first appearance in a
film as a partially nude body double for Isabella Rossellini
in Death
Becomes
Her (1992).
In 2003, Bell
played a supporting role in the comedy Bruce Almighty, which starred
Jim Carrey. She reprised that role in a cameo in the 2007 sequel,
Evan Almighty.
From 1997 to 2005, Bell played U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Sarah
MacKenzie on the television series JAG, as a practicing attorney
in the U.S. Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps of legal experts.
On September 14, 2006, Reuters/Hollywood
Reporter announced that Catherine Bell had joined the cast of Lifetime's
ensemble drama pilot "Army
Wives". In the projected series, Sally Pressman stars as a sassy
woman from the wrong side of the tracks who marries a soldier, moves
her kids to a military base and becomes friends with a diverse group
of Army wives, three of them played by Catherine Bell, Kim Delaney,
and Brigid Brannagh. Bell will play the wife of a US Army major,
a devoted homemaker who is enduring physical abuse at the hands of
her teenage son. In December, Lifetime announced it would produce
13 episodes of the series for 2007. Bell's character is named Denise
Sherwood.
Bell has also acted in the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries,
The Triangle, presented in December 2005, where she played the role
of an ocean
engineer. In 2006, she was nominated in Saturn Award
of Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films for Best
Supporting Actress on Television (The Triangle).
Bell was the grand marshal of the NASCAR
Nextel Cup Series race at Dover International Speedway on June
3, 2007.
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