Jenny McCarthy
Occupation : Actress, model
Birth Date : 1 November 1972
Birth Place : Chicago, Illinois, USA
Birth Name : Jennifer McCarthy
Nationality : American
Sex : F
Height : 5' 6 1/2"
Education : Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School in Chicago, Illinois
Southern Illinois University (majored in Psychology and Nursing, left after two years for financial reasons)
Relationship : Ray Manzella (manager; born in 1948; relationship ended in 1998) , John Mallory Asher (British; director; born on January 13, 1971; engaged in January 1999; married on September 11, 1999; filed for divorce in August 2005)
Father : Dan McCarthy (steel company foreman, separated in 1996)
Mother : Linda McCarthy (beautician)
Sister : Amy McCarthy (born in 1977), Joanne McCarthy (born in 1975), Lynette McCarthy (born in 1971)
Son : Evan Joseph Asher (born on May 18, 2002)
Cousin : Melissa McCarthy (actress; born on August 26, 1969)
Claim to fame : MTV host for Singled Out (1995-1997)
Fan Mail :
Jenny McCarthy
7920 Sunset Blvd., #401
Los Angeles, CA 90046-3300
USA
Jenny McCarthy has a great personality. Her vivacious charisma, snappy banter, and amusing facial expressions on MTV's Singled Out, a hyper-charged nineties version of The Dating Game, made the should-be stupid game show somehow bearable--nay, hypnotic. But McCarthy's show-business attributes extend beyond mere personality--the twenty-three-year-old former Playboy centerfold exhibits such profound perkiness that Hollywood producers have ignored her meager résumé and inundated her with proposals for game shows, talk shows, and sitcoms.
Just a few short years ago, in 1992, McCarthy was scrambling for funds to finance her second year of nursing studies at Southern Illinois University. She decided to quit school and embark on a modeling career, only to be told she was too curvy. She realized that Playboy prefers full-figured women over waifs, and hand-delivered photographs of herself to the magazine's Chicago office. The editors liked what they saw and paid McCarthy $20,000 to pose as Miss October 1993. A few months later, she won the Playmate of the Year title and $100,000 in cash and prizes. Now a certified babe, McCarthy moved from her native Chicago--where she grew up with three sisters, a stay-at-home mom, and her father, a steel-plant foreman--to Los Angeles in search of stardom.
She had a difficult time finding work in Hollywood, and it took incessant badgering from Ray Manzella, which at the time was Jenny's live-in boyfriend and manager. She finally got an interview at MTV and landed a co-hosting position on the network. She was an immediate success, and not only was she telegenic, but she handled hungry contestants with incurring (or committing) bodily harm.
Jenny McCarthy received permission to reformat the show to the format that best suited her talents. She became a full-fledged VJ getting paid an impressive $500,000 for the year. Jenny decided to leave Singled Out and focus her efforts on creating a new MTV sketch-variety series, The Jenny McCarthy Show. Her description of the show was, "Kind of like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on Acid." She developed a sitcom for NBC, in which she became the assistant of a Hollywood movie star, helping him with his mansion.
Play.boy detected this success; they now wanted to further their relationship with McCarthy. They offered her $500,000 for more of her nude pictures. She declined the offer, saying it wasn't the path she wanted to take. Play.boy settled for re-run pictures of her for upcoming issues.
Although she also declined proposals from Fox and the WB, McCarthy was nonetheless expanding beyond teen-oriented cable channels and gentlemen's magazines. She accepted the role of a blonde nurse in Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995) and later, portrayed her first substantial screen character as a neurotic movie star in The Stupids (1996), opposite Tom Arnold.
She later appeared on the movie Basketball by the creators of the funny cartoon South Park. She was recently featured in the sequel Scream 3, which proves that she has exceeded the advice that her mother gave her years ago: "Be like Vanna White."
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