| Suzanne Somers | |
|---|---|
Suzanne Somers, May 2006 |
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| Born | Suzanne Marie Mahoney October 16, 1946 San Bruno, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actress, author, businesswoman, singer |
| Years active | 1963–present |
| Spouse | Bruce Somers (1965–1968) Alan Hamel (1977–present) |
| Website | |
| http://www.suzannesomers.com/ | |
Suzanne Somers (born Suzanne Marie Mahoney; October 16, 1946) is an American actress, author, singer and businesswoman, known for her television roles as Chrissy Snow on Three's Company and as Carol Lambert on Step by Step.
Somers later became the author of a series of best-selling self-help books, including Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (2006), a book about bioidentical hormone replacement therapy.[1] She has also released two autobiographies, four diet books, and a book of poetry entitled "Touch Me" (1980). She currently features items of her design on ShopNBC.
She is criticized for her views on some medical subjects and her advocacy of the Wiley Protocol, which has been labelled as "scientifically unproven and dangerous".[2][3] Her promotion of alternative cancer treatments has received criticism from the American Cancer Society.[4]
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Born Suzanne Marie Mahoney in San Bruno, California, Somers was the third of four children in an Irish Catholic family.[5][6][7] Her mother, Marion Elizabeth (née Turner), was a medical secretary, and her father, Francis Mahoney, was a laborer (loading beer into boxcars) and gardener.[8] Her family attended church at St. Robert's Catholic Church in San Bruno.
She attended Capuchino High School,[9][10] then she was accepted at San Francisco College for Women (commonly referred to as "Lone Mountain College") a Catholic school that is now a campus of the University of San Francisco. She left during her sophomore year, after becoming pregnant by Bruce Somers, whom she married, giving birth to Bruce Jr. on November 8, 1965. She left her husband three years later. In 1971, her son was severely injured when he was hit by a car.
In 1968, Somers met her future husband Alan Hamel a then married man, while working on a game show. After a three year affair while Hamel was married, he finally divorced his wife to be with Somers. The couple married in 1977, and Hamel became her business manager.
In 2001 Somers announced that she had breast cancer, having a lumpectomy to remove the cancer followed by radiation therapy. She decided to forego chemotherapy in favor of alternative treatment.[11]
On January 9, 2007, the Associated Press reported that a wildfire in Southern California had destroyed Somers' Malibu home.[12]
She began acting in small roles during the late 1960s and early 1970s (including on various talk shows promoting her book of poetry, and bit parts in movies such as the "Blonde in the T-Bird" in American Graffiti, and an episode of the American version of the sitcom Lotsa Luck as the femme fatale in the early 1970s), had an uncredited role as a topless pool girl in Magnum Force in 1974, and guest starred on the 1977 episode "Cheshire Project" on The Six Million Dollar Man. She later landed the role of the ditzy blonde "Chrissy Snow" on the ABC sitcom Three's Company in 1977.
At the beginning of the fifth season, Somers demanded a hefty raise from $30,000 to $150,000 an episode and 10% ownership of the show's profit. Those close to the situation suggested that Somers' rebellion was due to husband Hamel's influences. When ABC denied her request, Somers boycotted the second and fourth shows of the season, due to several excuses such as a broken rib (which was false). She finished the remaining season on her contract, but her role was decreased to 60 seconds per episode. After her contract was terminated, she sued ABC for $2 million, claiming that her credibility in show business had been damaged. It went to an arbitrator who decided that Somers was owed only $30,000 due to a single missed episode for which she had not been paid. Other rulings favored the producers. Somers has said she was fired because she asked to be paid as much as the male actors on the show like Alan Alda of M*A*S*H, and Carroll O'Connor of Archie Bunker's Place.[13]
Before the feud with Three's Company producers and ABC ended, rival network CBS knew that Somers was ultimately going to be available. They signed her to a contract and a development deal for her own sitcom, which was going to be called The Suzanne Somers Show, in which she was to play an "over-the-top" airline stewardess. Once she was indeed available (after her firing from Three's Company), CBS gave Somers – and the public – a timeframe in which to expect the show to hit the air, but due to a change in administration at CBS' entertainment division in early 1982, the brass ended up passing on the project. Also, Somers claimed in her book After the Fall (1998), that the producers of Three's Company kept sending cease and desist forms to CBS stating that Somers could not use any of her Chrissy Snow characterization, and that chilled the creative process.
Somers appeared in two Playboy cover-feature nude pictorials: in 1980 and 1984. The first set of photos were taken by Stan Malinowski in February 1970 when Somers was a struggling model and actress and did a test photoshoot for the magazine. She was accepted as a Playmate candidate in 1971, but declined to pose nude before the actual shoot. During a Tonight Show appearance, she denied ever posing nude (except for a High Society topless photo), which prompted Playboy into publishing the photos from the 1970 Malinowski shoot in February 1980.[14] The second nude pictorial by Richard Fegley appeared in December 1984 in an attempt by Somers to regain her popularity after being terminated by Three's Company in 1982.
During the 1980s, Somers became a Las Vegas entertainer. She was the spokeswoman for the Thighmaster, a piece of exercise equipment that is squeezed between one's thighs. Thighmaster was one of the first products responsible for launching the infomercial concept. During this period of her career, she also performed for US servicemen overseas.[15][16]
At the height of her exposure as official spokesperson for Thighmaster infomercials, Somers made her first return to a series, although not on network television. In 1987, she starred in the sitcom She's the Sheriff, which ran in first-run syndication. Somers portrayed a widow with two young kids who decided to fill the shoes of her late husband, a sheriff of a southern town. The show ran for two seasons.
In 1990, Somers returned to network TV, appearing in numerous guest roles and made-for-TV movies, mostly for ABC. Her roles in these, including the movie Rich Men, Single Women, attracted the attention of Lorimar Television and Miller-Boyett Productions, who were developing a new sitcom. Somers had starred in the film with Heather Locklear, who inadvertently directed the focus of both production companies to Somers due to Locklear's starring role on Going Places (from Lorimar and Miller/Boyett). For Lorimar, this was asking Somers back, since they alone had produced She's the Sheriff.
In September 1991, Somers returned to TV starring in the sitcom Step By Step (with Patrick Duffy), which ran for seven seasons. Playing off her rejuvenated career, Somers also launched a daytime talk show in 1994, albeit briefly, titled Suzanne Somers. During Step By Step's final season, on CBS, she began co-hosting Candid Camera with Peter Funt.
From 1997–99, Somers cohosted the revised Candid Camera show, when CBS chose to bring it back with Peter Funt. Somers stayed for two years before PAX TV renewed the series without her.
In summer 2005, Somers made her Broadway debut in a one-woman show, The Blonde in the Thunderbird, a collection of stories about her life and career. The show was supposed to run until September, but was cancelled in less than a week after poor reviews and disappointing ticket sales.[17] Somers blamed the harsh reviews (The New York Times referred to it as "...a drab and embarrassing display of emotional exhibitionism masquerading as entertainment"[18]) and told the New York Post: "These men [New York critics] are curmudgeons, and maybe I went too close to the bone for them. I was lying there naked, and they decided to kick me and step on me, just like these visions you see in Iraq."[19]
Somers supports bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. Her book, Ageless,[20] includes interviews with 16 practitioners of bioidentical hormone therapy, but gives extra discussion to one specific approach, the 'Wiley Protocol'. Somers and T. S. Wiley, the originator of the Wiley Protocol, have been criticized for their advocacy of the Wiley Protocol. A group of seven doctors, all of whom utilize bioidentical hormone therapies to address health issues in women, issued a public letter to Somers and her publisher, Crown, in which they state that the protocol is "scientifically unproven and dangerous" and cite Wiley's lack of medical and clinical qualifications.[2] The use of bioidentical hormone therapies is a very controversial area of medicine;[3] its efficacy has never been tested and numerous groups have expressed concern over its safety and the misleading claims made by practitioners.[21]
Her promotion of them, and Oprah Winfrey's support of her, has been the subject of an Associated Press article:[4]
In 2001, Somers was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy, and radiation, but declined to undergo chemotherapy.[3] In November, 2008, Suzanne Somers announced she was diagnosed with inoperable cancer by six doctors, but Somers learned a week later that she was misdiagnosed. During this time, she interviewed doctors about cancer treatments and these interviews became the basis of her book, Knockout, about alternative treatments to chemotherapy.[22] In her book Knockout, Somers promotes alternative cancer treatments, for which she has received criticism from the American Cancer Society:
She is also opposed to water fluoridation.[23]
In the movie "Sex and the City 2" Samantha, one of the characters, advocates Suzanne Somers' book and method of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy [24]