Teri Hatcher

Teri Lynn Hatcher (born December 8, 1964) is an American actress and singer best known for her portrayals of Lois Lane on the television series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993–1997), Paris Carver in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Mel Jones and the Beldam in Coraline (2009), and Susan Mayer on the television series Desperate Housewives (2004–2012), for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy and three Screen Actors Guild Awards (one as lead female actor, two as part of Best Ensemble), and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.

Hatcher was born on December 8, 1964, in Palo Alto, California, the only child of Esther (née Beshur), a computer programmer who worked for Lockheed Martin, and Owen Walker Hatcher, Jr., a nuclear physicist and electrical engineer.

Her father is of Welsh and Choctaw Indian descent, while her mother is of French, German and Syrian ancestry.

Hatcher took ballet lessons at the San Juan School of Dance in Los Altos and grew up in Sunnyvale, California.

At De Anza College she studied mathematics and engineering.

One of her early jobs (in 1984) was as an NFL cheerleader with the San Francisco 49ers.

From September 1985 to May 1986 she joined the cast of the TV series The Love Boat as Amy, one of the Mermaid showgirls.

It mainly involved dancing and singing as part of the Mermaids show routine, but she had short comedic lines in some episodes, and in one episode was part of one of three storylines opposite a male guest star.

From 1986 to 1989, she appeared in six episodes of the TV series MacGyver as talkative but naive Penny Parker opposite Richard Dean Anderson's eponymous hero.

In 1987, she played the sensible, intelligent 18-year-old daughter of Patty Duke's lead character in the short-lived Fox comedy Karen's Song, and had a guest-star role in an episode of Night Court.

In 1988, she made a short guest appearance in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Outrageous Okona as Lt. Robinson.

In 1989, she guest-starred in an episode of Quantum Leap, "Star Crossed", as the main character's mathematician/scientist future wife; and guest-starred as a nude beauty pageant winner in an episode of L.A. Law.

That year she also made her motion picture debut with a minor role as a young opportunistic actress in The Big Picture, starring Kevin Bacon.

She then played Sylvester Stallone's younger sister, a dancer, in the big-budget police action-comedy Tango and Cash, also starring Kurt Russell; it was a critical and box office disappointment.

After a short guest appearance in an episode of Murphy Brown in 1990, Hatcher's next TV series role, in 1991, was in the Norman Lear creation Sunday Dinner, a comedy.

She co-starred as 30-year-old lawyer in a mostly physical relationship with a widowed businessman twice her age, played by Robert Loggia.

The series had a brief run on CBS that summer but was not renewed.

She also acted in the television crime movie Dead in the Water (1991) in which she plays Bryan Brown's lawyer's young, attractive Temptress secretary, and in the low-budget erotic thriller The Cool Surface (not released until 1994), wherein she plays a young actress who has an ill-fated romance with an enigmatic, unsettled screenwriter.

In late 1991 Hatcher was featured as Michael Bolton's love interest in the music video for Bolton's hit song "Missing You Now".

In 1992, Hatcher tried out for the role of Jamie Buchman on Mad About You and made it to the final two choices, but lost the part to Helen Hunt.

Hatcher made a much-discussed guest appearance on a 1993 episode of Seinfeld, in which her character, Sidra, breaks up with Jerry because she believes Jerry sent his friend Elaine into a sauna to find out if Sidra's breasts are natural or enhanced by surgery.

The episode concludes with Sidra saying to Jerry, "By the way, they're real, and they're spectacular" as she leaves his apartment.

Hatcher returned to play Sidra in brief scenes in two subsequent episodes: "The Pilot", the fourth season finale, and "The Finale (Part 2)", the series finale.

Hatcher landed a starring role in the ABC television series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman as the Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (opposite Dean Cain as Superman/Clark Kent) from 1993 to 1997.

At the height of the show's popularity in 1995, a picture of Hatcher wrapped in a Superman cape was reportedly the most downloaded image on the Internet for several months.

"It's a great shot," she said.

"Not so much because it's me. It's just cool looking."

Hatcher also co-wrote an episode for season three called "It's A Small World After All" about a former classmate who shrinks and kidnaps her classmate's spouses and traps them in a dollhouse.

Hatcher hosted NBC's Saturday Night Live in 1996.

Hatcher won the role of Paris Carver (beating Monica Bellucci) in the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies.

Hatcher was three months pregnant at the filming's start, by her husband, Jon Tenney.

A publicist said the pregnancy did not affect the production schedule.

She was voted the world's sexiest woman by readers of popular men's magazine FHM in spring 1997 after having been number four in 1996 and was number 15 in 1998; she also made the list's top 100 in 1999 and 2000.

In 2002, she assisted Santa Clara County prosecutors with their indictment of Stone for a more recent sexual offense that led his female victim to commit suicide at 14.

Stone pleaded guilty to four counts of child sexual abuse and was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Hatcher said she told the prosecutors about her own abuse because she was haunted by thoughts of the 14-year-old girl who shot herself, and feared Stone might escape conviction.

In March 2006, she alleged that she was sexually abused from the age of five by Richard Hayes Stone, an uncle by marriage who was later divorced by Hatcher's aunt.

She said her parents were unaware of the abuse.

Stone died of colon cancer on August 19, 2008, after serving six years of his sentence.

Hatcher studied acting at the American Conservatory Theater.