Catherine Bell

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.