Who

A preppy pin-up in the '70s, Bergen later became famous as TV's favorite uptight working woman, Murphy Brown.

Backstory

Bergen was raised in Hollywood, the daughter of popular radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and made appearances on her dad's program during her teen years. College didn't work out so well for Candy: She was kicked out of Penn for her grades and turned to modeling before earning her first film role (as a lesbian) in Sidney Lumet's 1966 girls-school drama The Group. The flick launched a succession of mostly mediocre starlet roles. Although she achieved star status in the '70s—she was the first woman to host Saturday Night Live in 1975—her career cooled when she settled down at the end of the decade. She returned to the spotlight in 1988 when she joined the cast of Murphy Brown, playing an acerbic TV newscaster, a character rumored to be based on Linda Ellerbee.

Bergen stayed with the show until 1998. Post-Murphy, she (unwisely) turned down a job on 60 Minutes in favor of hosting her own Oxygen network talk show, Exhale with Candice Bergen, which was cancelled after a year. She's since had roles in a string of crappy comedies like Miss Congeniality, Sweet Home Alabama, and View from the Top. Her career took a turn upward in 2005 when she joined the cast of Boston Legal as Shirley Schmidt.

Pet causes

Bergen has long been ahead of her time: Back in the '70s, she got into the kind of narcissistic pseudo-activism that's become a trademark of current stars like Angelina Jolie and Tim Robbins. Among the highlights of her career as an activist: participating in a celebrity lie-down in the corridors of the Senate to protest the Vietnam war; protesting the assassination of Martin Luther King by driving around Beverly Hills in a Mercedes with the lights on; and investing in a non-violent leather company that made goods only from cows that had died of natural causes.

Drama

Bergen entered into a highly-publicized spat with then-Vice President Dan Quayle in the early '90s after he blasted Murphy Brown for making it seem acceptable to be a single mother. Bergen fired back by dumping a sack of potatoes on Quayle's lawn—a dig at his now-famous spelling error—and thanking him when she won an Emmy for the show in 1992.

Personal

Bergen had a 14-year marriage to French film director Louis Malle, who succumbed to cancer in 1995; she has a daughter from the marriage, Chloé. In June 2000, she married real estate developer and widower Marshall Rose. (They were introduced by 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt.) Although she moved in with Rose at 1040 Fifth Avenue, she held on to her previous apartment in the same neighborhood, which she now uses as an office. Bergen and Rose also own homes on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton and Los Angeles.

True story

Bergen once lived at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles with her then-beau Terry Melcher, a music exec and son of Doris Day. The home was later the site of the infamous Charles Manson murders, and it was theorized that Bergen and Melcher were Manson's intended targets.

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