Shelley Long (born August 23, 1949) is an American actress, singer, and comedian. For her role as Diane Chambers on the sitcom Cheers,[2] Long received five Emmy nominations, winning in 1983 for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.[3] She also won two Golden Globe Awards for the role.[4] Long reprised her role as Diane Chambers in three episodes of the spin-offFrasier, for which she received an additional guest star Emmy nomination. In 2009, she began playing the recurring role of DeDe Pritchett on the ABC comedy series Modern Family.
Shelley Long was born on August 23, 1949, in Indian Village, Fort Wayne, Indiana.[5] She is the only child of Ivadine (née Williams), a schoolteacher, and Leland Long who worked in the rubber industry before becoming a teacher as well.[6]
Shelley was raised in the Presbyterian faith. She was active on her high school speech team, competing in the Indiana High School Forensic Association. In 1967, she won the National Forensic League's National Championship in Original Oratory.[7]
After graduating from South Side High School in Fort Wayne, she studied drama at Northwestern University[2] but left before graduating to pursue a career in acting and modeling. Her first job was at the university as a meal plan checker.
Career
Long's break as an actress occurred when she began performing in local commercials for Homemakers furniture store in the Chicago area.[8]
Early roles
In Chicago, Long joined The Second City comedy troupe. In 1975, she began writing, producing, and co-hosting the television program Sorting It Out on WMAQ-TV[9] and went on to win three Regional Emmys for her work on the show.[10] She also appeared in the 1970s in VO5 shampoo print advertisements and in commercials for Camay soap as well as more Homemakers furniture commercials. In 1978, she appeared in a vignette on The Love Boat.[11]
Although she had already been in feature films, Long became famous for her role in the long-running television sitcom Cheers as the character Diane Chambers, who has a tempestuous on-and-off relationship with Sam Malone.[13] The show was slow to capture an audience but eventually became one of the more popular on the air. Amid some controversy, Long left Cheers after season five in 1987.[16]
In the Cheers biography documentary, co-star Ted Danson admitted there was tension between them but "never at a personal level and always at a work level" due to their different modes of working. He also stated that Long was much more similar to her TV character than she might have liked to admit, but also said that her performances often "carried the show."[17][18] Long said in later interviews that it did not occur to her, when deciding to leave, that she was going to "sabotage a show" and she felt confident that the rest of the cast could continue without her.[19]
In a 2003 interview with Graham Norton, Long said she left for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was her desire to spend more time with her daughter. In a 2007 interview on Australian television, Long said Danson was "a delight to work with" and talked of her love for co-star Nicholas Colasanto ("Coach"), who was "one of my closest friends on set". She said she left the show because she "didn't want to keep doing the same episode over and over again and the same story. I didn't want it to become old and stale." She went on to say that "working at Cheers was a dream come true...it was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. So, yes, I missed it, but I never regretted that decision."[20]
Long's first post-Cheers project was Hello Again, a comedy about a housewife who is brought back from the dead. This was followed by Troop Beverly Hills, a comedy about another housewife who takes leadership of a 'Wilderness Girl' troop to bond with her daughter and distract herself from divorce proceedings. Neither film was successful with critics or at the box office.
In 1990, Long returned to television for the fact-based miniseries Voices Within: The Lives of Truddi Chase. She received critical praise for the role, which required her to portray nearly 20 personalities. This introduced her to more dramatic roles in TV films, after which she starred in several more throughout the 1990s.[22]
In 1992, she starred in Fatal Memories: The Eileen Franklin Story, a television drama about a woman who remembers the childhood trauma of being raped by her father and his cronies, and witnessing him murder her childhood friend to prevent the child from "telling on him," based on a 1989 case.[23] The still-controversial "recovered memories" basis for the prosecution resulted in the conviction and sentencing of life imprisonment of George Franklin,[24] a conviction that was later overturned.[25]
Long starred in the 1992 film A Message from Holly with Lindsay Wagner. Long plays a workaholic who finds out that her best friend has cancer and only six months to live, then stays with her in her last months.[26]
In 1993, the actress returned to Cheers for its series finale, and picked up another Emmy nomination for her return as Diane.[27] She also starred in the sitcom Good Advice with Treat Williams and Teri Garr, a show that lasted two seasons.[28] She later resurfaced as Diane in several episodes of the Kelsey Grammer spinoff series Frasier, for which she was nominated for another Emmy Award.[29]
Both Outrageous Fortune co-star Bette Midler and Paramount studio executive Richard H. Frank, who helped develop Cheers, described Long as being difficult to work with.[30][31]
In 1999, she starred in another television film Vanished Without a Trace, about a woman who refuses to accept the kidnapping of her 13-year-old daughter and relentlessly pursues the villain's capture (not to be confused with the 1993 film of the same name about the 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping.) In 2000, she appeared as one of the women in the Richard Gere film Dr. T & the Women, directed by Robert Altman.[29]
Long's first marriage, to Ken Solomon, ended in divorce in the 1970s after only
a few years.[33] In 1979 she met her second husband, Bruce Tyson, a securities broker. They married in 1981 and had a daughter, Juliana.[6] Long and Tyson separated in 2003 and divorced in 2004.[citation needed]
8 episodes Nominated – Gold Derby Awards for Comedy Guest Actress (2010) Nominated – OFTA Television Award for Best Guest Actress in a Comedy Series (2011)
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