Teri Hatcher Biography

Before winning fans over as the sexy, charming, inquisitive, and accident-prone Susan Mayer on the critically acclaimed television drama Desperate Housewives, Teri Hatcher's alternate identity was as Lois Lane in the hit TV series Lois Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.Teri Hatcher was born on December 8, 1964 in California , the only child of parents Owen and Esther Hatcher.She started in show business as a ballerina, having taken ballet lessons as a child, and later studied acting at the American Conservatory Theater, worked as a cheerleader for the San Francisco 49ers football team, and played a mermaid on Aaron Spelling's Love Boat for its final season in the mid-80s.Before landing her breakthrough role as Lois Lane in 1993, Hatcher guest starred in a number of different television series, such as MacGyver, starring Richard Dean Anderson, Star Trek: The Next Generation, which starred Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, and Brent Spiner, L.A. Law, Quantum Leap, starring Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell, Murphy Brown, with Candice Bergen in the lead role, and Tales from the Crypt, featuring the voice talents of John Kassir as the creepy Crypt keeper corpse.She also landed the role of Katherine Kiki Tango in the popular 1989 flick Tango Cash, alongside Kurt Russell and Sylvester Stallone.Hatcher garnered critical acclaim as Lois on Lois Clark from 1993 to 1997, largely for the chemistry she shared with co-star Dean Cain, who played Clark Kent and Superman. Other notable actors of the series include Lane Smith (as Perry White), John Shea (as Lex Luthor), and K Callan and Eddie Jones as Clark's parents.Another memorable role of Hatcher's was for three episodes as Sidra in the hit show Seinfeld, where she dated Jerry Seinfeld and later broke up with him upon discovering he had sent Elaine (Julia Louis Dreyfus) to figure out if she had breast implants.Hatcher is also known for playing a Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) as Paris Carver, alongside Pierce Brosnan, Jonathan Pryce, and Michelle Yeoh.She now is kept quite busy (and quite happy, making close to $400,000 per episode) as Susan, the divorc e and single mother of one daughter in Desperate Housewives, a role for which she has won a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild, and an Emmy. Hatcher stars alongside Eva Longoria, Marcia Cross, Felicity Huffman, and Brenda Strong.Hatcher is actually a real-life divorc e (twice over) and a real-life single mother of one daughter, Emerson Rose (1997), whom she had with her second husband, actor Jon Tenney, whom she married in 1994 and divorced in 2003. She was married to her first husband, Marcus Leithold, for one year in the late-80s. Hatcher has also been romantically linked to George Clooney and Ryan Seacrest.One not-so-glorious part of Hatcher's life was revealed in a spring 2006 interview captured in Vanity Fair in which Hatcher confessed that she had been sexually abused starting at age five by her then-uncle (through marriage), Richard Hayes Stone, whom she later helped to convict in 2002 with a molestation case involving a female 14-year-old victim who committed suicide. Stone was sentenced to 14 years in prison.However, in spite of this tragedy, Hatcher continues to enjoy success and happiness.Aside from her high-profile T.V. celebrity life, Hatcher is also an author, and recently released her first book: Burnt Toast: And Other Philosophies of Life. She also just started dating actor-director Stephen Kay, the ex-boyfriend of her DH co-star Eva Longoria.

• AskMen.com - Teri Hatcher