Shelley Long To fans, Shelley Long will always be known for her Diane Chambers character on Cheers, a part she played to near perfection. After leaving the show and winning numerous awards for the role, she never did recapture that glory, and now after a divorce and suicide attempt, her acting future is unknown.
Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on August 23, 1949, Long was an only child. After winning the national championship with her high school speech team, she went on to study drama at Northwestern University, only to drop out to pursue a career as an actress and model. She landed in Chicago as part of the Second City comedy troupe, and also hosted a local television show, Sorting It Out. She also appeared in small roles on a few television series, such as The Love Boat, Family, and M*A*S*H.
Long's first co-starring role came in 1980 in A Small Circle of Friends, a movie about students at Harvard University in 1960, starring with Brad Davis, Karen Allen, and Jameson Parker. She followed this starring in the made-for-television movie The Promise of Love, once again appearing with Jameson Parker, as well as Valerie Bertinelli. Her career on the rise, two film comedies came next, Caveman, with Ringo Starr and Dennis Quaid, and Night Shift with Henry Winkler and Michael Keaton.
The most pivotal role for Long came in 1982, starring with Ted Danson in the television comedy Cheers, as Diane Chambers, the woman who becomes a barmaid, after being ditched. Working with other actors, such as George Wendt, Rhea Perlman, and Kelsey Grammer, Long won an Emmy award and two Golden Globes for this role. When not busy with the television show, Long was filming movies, such as Losin' It with Tom Cruise and Jackie Earle Haley, and Irreconcilable Differences with Ryan O'Neal and Drew Barrymore. With the success of even more movies, The Money Pit with Tom Hanks, and Outrageous Fortune with Better Midler, Long made the difficult decision to leave Cheers and the role of Diane Chambers to film movies full time.
Long would never have that type of success again, though, as her first movie after her stint on Cheers was Troop Beverly Hills with Craig T. Nelson, and it did poorly with critics and at the box office. The movies Don't Tell Her It's Me with Steve Guttenberg and Jami Gertz, and Frozen Assets with Corbin Bernsen didn't fare much better, and Long then returned to Cheers one last time for the series finale, although she did appear on its Kelsey Grammer spinoff, Frasier, a few times, reprising the role of Diane Chambers.
It wasn't more than a year before Long was starring in her own sitcom, Good Advice, with Treat Williams, but the series only lasted a few years. She then found her most successful role since Diane Chambers, playing the movie version of Carol Brady in The Brady Bunch Movie, and its sequels, A Very Brady Sequel and The Brady Bunch in the White House. Long has also filmed a few made-for-television movies and the feature film Dr. T and the Women, with Richard Gere and Helen Hunt. Her career was then relegated back to guest starring roles on television series, with turns on Murphy Brown, Diagnosis Murder, and 8 Simple Rules ... For Dating My Teenage Daughter, and appeared in another film, Honeymoon with Mom alongside Richard Scalia
In 1981, Long had married Bruce Tyson, a securities broker, and together they had a daughter, Julia, who was born in 1985. Tyson filed for divorce in 2004, and late that year, Long overdosed on painkillers in an apparent suicide attempt. In early 2007, she admitted herself into an outpatient medical treatment facility, for undisclosed reasons. YUDDY |
