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Christina Applegate Profile: Childhood, Career, Films in Details
Christina Applegate made her TV debut at three months of age. Her mother, actress Nancy Priddy, was a regular on the soap opera Days of our Lives, and when Applegate was born, she appeared on the show in her mother's arms. In her first movie, 1981's King Cobra when she was 9, Applegate again played her mother's daughter.
With her mother's connections, she easily found work as a child actress, appearing on shows like Quincy, Charles in Charge, and Family Ties in the mid-1980s. She played Rick Schroder's prom date on Silver Spoons, and played Grace Kelly as a child in a 1983 TV biopic, Grace Kelly.
Her first TV series was Showtime's political comedy Washingtoon in 1985 (as a Congressman's daughter). The next year, she was a cop's daughter on the police drama Heart of the City. Then, starting in 1987 when she was 16, Applegate played the nymphomaniac Kelly Bundy on the classic anti-family comedy Married with Children for eleven years.
"The secret to playing dumb," says Applegate, "is that you think that everything you're saying is completely brilliant, that you're right-on about everything, and also I used to play [Kelly] as a virgin. That's what I'd tell myself before I'd go out, so she had this sort of wonderful, vulnerable quality about her."
Her subsequent sitcom, Jesse, put Applegate into a silly costume as a barmaid, and somehow lasted two seasons despite very few chuckles.
She has also played a teen prostitute in 1990's Streets, a sleazy drug dealer in Wonderland, Gwyneth Paltrow's best friend in View from the Top, and Cameron Diaz's friend in The Sweetest Thing. In 1995's Vibrations, Applegate runs the rave where a handless keyboard-player finds redemption -- you have to see it to believe it, but that is not a recommendation.
Married with Children was a classic lowbrow comedy, and she was always excellent in it, but after 11 years as Kelly the slutty sexpot it has been hard for audiences to see Applegate as anything else. As you might expect, she is weary of her perpetual "dumb blond" image, and she probably deserves better than Jesse, and better than most of her lousy movies.
"There are people, including certain studio executives who will remain nameless, who still think of me as an 18 year old girl with long blonde hair and tight clothes. Maybe they're not on the up and up with what I've done in the last few years and that's okay. That'll happen. But it gets really old. I mean, we stopped doing Married with Children a long time ago. It was another century ago." --Christina Applegate
In 2004, Applegate's movie career got a big lift with Anchorman, where she played a non-bimbo early TV anchorwoman, to Will Ferrell's dismay. She also appeared in the comedy Surviving Christmas, with Ben Affleck, James Gandolfini, and Bill Macy.
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What She Said?
"There are a lot of sacrifices a mother makes when she's raising a child by herself. I saw it when I was growing up, watching all my mother did for me. But it wasn't until recently that I fully understood the price she paid because of how we had to struggle."
"This was a major commitment. I really had to sit and think about it. I eventually came to the conclusion that it came into my life for a reason." - on accepting her role in the sitcom "Jesse" (1998).
“A lot of women, like my mother, never got into another relationship. She knew I didn't want it; it would take attention away from me.”
“The holidays are also a time when people freak out about their finances. If you don't want to spend the money, why not try some of the other options instead of killing a bunch of animals?”
“Vibrations.”
"The person who I have my child with is going to be the right person. I don't want to raise a child by myself. I could do it. But I definitely don't want to. I want to be a mother who has the original father there. And I want to be with that person until I'm 80 years old, sitting out on the porch with our glasses of lemonade, laughing about our lives."
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