LAUREN HOLLY Biography - Actors and Actresses

 
 

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LAUREN HOLLY

Name: Lauren Michael Holly                                                         
Born: 28 October 1963 Bristol, Pennsylvania, United States                         
                                                                                   
Lauren Michael Holly (born October 28, 1963) is an American actress. She is best   
known for her role as Deputy Sheriff Maxine Stewart in the TV series Picket       
Fences and as Mary Swanson in the 1994 film Dumb & Dumber, co-starring Jim         
Carrey. She currently portrays NCIS Director Jenny Shepard on the TV series NCIS. 
                                                                                   
Lauren Holly was born in Bristol, Pennsylvania. Both of her parents are           
educators. Her father is an English Literature professor at Hobart and William     
Smith Colleges, her mother Michael Ann Holly an eminent art historian who was a   
professor at the University of Rochester. Lauren was raised in upstate Geneva,     
New York, and is a 1981 graduate of Geneva High School, where she was a           
cheerleader. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1985 with a B.A.         
degree in English Literature.                                                     
                                                                                   
At the age of 23, Holly joined the cast of the iconic ABC television soap opera   
All My Children as Julie Chandler (1986–1989). She portrayed the comic book     
character Betty on television's Archie: To Riverdale and Back Again in 1990.       
                                                                                   
Perhaps her best known film role came as Mary Swanson, Lloyd Christmas's love     
interest in the 1994 Jim Carrey comedy Dumb & Dumber. She also portrayed Linda     
Lee Cadwell, the wife of legendary martial artist and actor Bruce Lee in Dragon:   
The Bruce Lee Story (1993), a doctor in Sydney Pollack's remake of Sabrina (1995) 
and a Naval officer, Lieutenant Emily Lake, the only woman aboard a submarine,     
in the Kelsey Grammer comedy Down Periscope (1996).                               
                                                                                   
Holly starred as small-town Deputy Sheriff Maxine Stewart in David E. Kelley's     
long-running TV series Picket Fences. In 2005, she joined the cast of NCIS as     
Director Jenny Shepard.