Jan Hooks

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Jan Hooks in 1988

Jan Hooks (born April 23, 1957) is an American actress and comedian best known for her work on NBC's Saturday Night Live, on which she appeared from 1986 to 1991. She was born in Decatur, Georgia, near Atlanta.

Hooks began her career as a member of the Los Angeles-based comedy troupe The Groundlings. She first achieved television notoriety on the HBO comedy series Not Necessarily the News in the early 1980s. Hooks was first considered for SNL in 1985, but the show's producers chose Joan Cusack instead (mostly because, at age 28, Hooks was thought to be too old for the show). After the 1985 season proved to be a ratings disaster for SNL, returning producer Lorne Michaels offered Hooks a contract in 1986. Together with new recruits Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, and others, Hooks helped put the show back in the national spotlight.

Jan Hooks' characters included one half of "The Sweeney Sisters" with Nora Dunn, as well as impressions of Kathy Lee Gifford, Nancy Reagan, Sinéad O'Connor, Elizabeth Dole, and Hillary Clinton. Her five year stint on Saturday Night Live is all the more amazing because she has admitted to having extreme stage fright.

Tiring of the stress of performing on a live show, Hooks left SNL in 1991 after being handpicked by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason to replace Jean Smart on the CBS sitcom Designing Women. Jan played the role of Carlene Dobber for the final two seasons of the show. Since then, she has made appearances in several movies, done voice work on The Simpsons as Manjula Nahasapeemapetilon, starred as Dixie Glick in the series Primetime Glick and in the movie Jiminy Glick in Lalawood, and had a recurring role as the trashy Vicki Dubcek on 3rd Rock from the Sun.