This British brunette beauty is most well known for her co-starring role as Sarah MacKenzie on the long-running hit TV series JAG.

Catherine Bell was born on August 14, 1968, in London, England, to an Iranian mother and Scottish father. After her parents split, she moved to L.A. with her mom when she was just three, and nine years later became a U.S. naturalized citizen.

As a child, Bell was a young model featured in various television commercials, which would later prove to be the early start to her career.

As a young adult, she decided to pursue a career in full-time modeling after dropping out of the UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) where she was studying sciences, with the original intent of becoming a physician or a biomedical engineer—a far cry from modeling. One of her most notable modeling jobs was located in Japan for an extended contracted assignment.

Bell’s film debut was in 1992’s Death Becomes Her as actress Isabella Rossellini’s body double in a nude scene. The film also featured Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis, and Goldie Hawn.

She also appeared in various made-for-TV movies and TV series, including one episode of Friends, the most successful comedy series of all time, starring Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer, in its second season.

Bell also landed a supporting role as Susan Ortega in the 2003 comedic film Bruce Almighty, starring Jim Carrey, Jennifer Aniston, Morgan Freeman, and Steve Carell.

However, her most notable role to date was as the leading lady on the popular CBS TV series JAG from 1997 to 2005, where she played an attorney in the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General Corps of legal experts, U.S. Marine Corps Major Sarah MacKenzie. The show, which also starred David James Elliot, Patrick Laborteaux, and John M Jackson, originally aired on NBC in 1995, then was pulled off the air due to low ratings, but was reinstated through CBS in 1997 for eight seasons.

Bell, who speaks fluent Farsi in addition to English, married Adam Beason on May 8, 1994, and together the couple has one daughter born in spring 2003, Gemma.

The actress is currently slated to star as Denise Sherwood, the wife of a U.S. Army major, in Lifetime’s new series Army Wives, alongside Brigid Brannagh, Sterling K Brown, Jeremy Davidson, Kim Delaney, and Wendy Davis. The new program is slated to debut in early 2007 with thirteen episodes for the second half of the 2006-2007 TV season.

Bell is also a thyroid cancer survivor, having had her thyroid gland removed back when she was just in her twenties, and has been actively affiliated with Scientology since 1990.

YUDDY