Bebe Neuwirth

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Bebe Neuwirth (born December 31, 1958) is a sexy Tony Award-winning American theater, television, and film actress.

She was born Beatrice Neuwirth to Jewish American parents Lee, a mathematician, and Sydney Anne, an artist, in Princeton, New Jersey. She began to study dance at the age of five, and chose it as her field of concentration when she attended Juilliard in New York City in 1976 and 1977. During this period, she performed with the Princeton Ballet Company in Peter and the Wolf, The Nutcracker, and Coppelia and appeared in community theater musicals.

Neuwirth made her Broadway debut in the role of Sheila in A Chorus Line in 1980. She has been featured in revivals of Little Me (1982) Sweet Charity (1986), for which she received a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, and Damn Yankees (1994). It was with the 1996 revival of Chicago, in which she starred as showgirl and killer Velma Kelly, that she gained her greatest stage recognition. Her performance garnered her Tony and Drama Desk Awards as Best Lead Actress in a Musical. On December 31, 2006, Neuwirth will be returning to the still-running production, this time in the role of Roxie Hart.

Her screen credits include Green Card (with Andie MacDowell and Gérard Depardieu), Bugsy (with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Jumanji (with Robin Williams), Summer of Sam, Tadpole (for which the Seattle Film Critics named her Best Supporting Actress, and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.

Among television viewers, Neuwirth is best known as Dr. Lillith Sternin, the extremely conservative and emotionally repressed psychiatrist who married Dr. Frasier Crane on the hit comedy series Cheers, in which she appeared from 1986 to 1993. The character also made an appearence in the series Wings and eleven episodes of the Cheers spin-off Frasier, which garned her a 1995 Emmy Award nomination as Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series. Her additional small-screen credits include two shortlived dramatic series, Hack in 2003 and Law & Order: Trial by Jury in 2005-2006. She has appeared as herself in an episode of Will and Grace and on Celebrity Jeopardy!

Preceded by: Donna Murphy for The King and I	Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical 1997 for Chicago	Succeeded by: Natasha Richardson for Cabaret