Get your own Free Home Page
During a 1996 company party held at the Sunset Boulevard House of Blues, an ABC Entertainment exec watched Jenna Elfman launch into a spunky, slinky, spur-of-the-moment dance solo and was so enraptured by the spectacle that he thereafter referred to the brief performance as a "religious experience." Such is the undeniable appeal of this California-bred bombshell who has charmed couch potatoes from coast to coast in the course of her meteoric ascent to the upper echelon of sitcom stardom. And her nationwide congregation grows in size every week.
Paparazzi have discovered Elfman to be disarmingly down-to-earth, a quality the actress attributes to her singularly stable upbringing in one of those near-mythic nuclear families. The daughter of a Hughes Aircraft executive and a homemaker, Elfman was born and raised in Los Angeles. While still quite young, she thought she might like to become a nun, but it soon became clear that she had the soul of an entertainer. In the sixth grade, for instance, one teacher had so much trouble getting the boisterous Elfman to sit still and pay attention to a math lesson that she sealed the chatty child's lips with electrical tape. Things got rougher in the years that followed: Elfman shot up an ungainly five inches in one year, and endured braces for three years in an effort to correct an overbite that had earned her the nickname "Bucky Beaver." Following her graduation from high school, she went on to attend one and a half semesters of college at Cal-State Northridge--when she found that higher education held little appeal for her, she moved across town to look for a raison d'être in Hollywood.
Trained in classical dance from the age of five, the statuesque nineteen-year-old's first instinct was to become a ballerina, and she briefly considered joining Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet (the company is known for accepting tall dancers). Though overstressed ankles from years of pointe dancing ultimately tipped the scales against the classical form, a toe-tappin' gig in the 1991 Academy Awards extravaganza launched Elfman's career as a dancer for television and film productions. The hoofer's accumulated experiences performing on such primetime network stalwarts as Murder, She Wrote eventually sparked in her a serious interest in acting. She enrolled at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, where she studied under noted drama coach Milton Katselas. Commercial work for AT&T, Sprite, Clearasil, and Honda helped pay the bills and gained the rookie valuable experience in front of the camera. At the same time, Elfman kept her dance instincts sharp: one of her more notable gigs was joining ZZ Top's 1994 World Tour as a "Legs Girl."
Shortly thereafter, Elfman secured the services of an agent, with whose help she began to win more substantial, if still relatively minor, acting jobs in a string of episodes of shows as diverse as Roseanne and NYPD Blue. In the summer of 1996, she filmed a brief part in her first feature film, Grosse Pointe Blank. By the time studios began casting for fall television pilots, Elfman had made a resolution to score a part in the cast of a new series, and before too long, she managed to land a recurring role in the ABC sitcom Townies. Elfman made a splash in the supporting role, stealing whatever glory there was to be gained from the limp effort away from the show's top-billed star, former eighties-everyteen Molly Ringwald.
Both ABC and Twentieth Century Fox rushed in to woo Elfman with do-it-your-way development deals the very same day the six-episode loser was given the official ax. The energetic actress found herself torn between the greater freedom of a production pact with a major studio and a sense of loyalty to the network that jump-started her television career. She solved her dilemma by inking a deal with Fox and pitching her first project, a sitcom called Dharma & Greg, to execs at ABC. Mere months after Townies had already become a minor footnote in TV history, Dharma & Greg, Elfman's starring vehicle, entered advanced stages of production. She knew the casting of her co-star would be critical to the success of the show; she summarily dismissed an entire roomful of potential Gregs before laying eyes on the lanky Thomas Gibson, who was fresh from a critically applauded year of portraying Chicago Hope's Dr. Daniel Nyland. Thanks mostly to the infectious chemistry between Elfman and Gibson, Dharma & Greg became one of 1997's breakout TV triumphs.
Since 1995, Elfman has been happily married to actor Bodhi Elfman, the nephew of composer-rocker Danny Elfman, of Oingo Boingo fame. The effervescent actress and her husband are practicing Scientologists, and they hope to eventually make time to have children. But time will likely be in short supply for Elfman in the foreseeable future, considering the rate at which Dharma & Greg keeps racking up the ratings points. Like many of her small-screen peers, Elfman is driven to also conquer the silver screen: she'll have her first shot at winning over the popcorn crowd with a starring role opposite Richard Dreyfuss in Disney's spring 1998 release Krippendorf's Tribe, in which she'll play an anthropologist who goes to great lengths to secure a government grant; and she has also filmed a cameo appearance alongside fellow tube ingenues Jennifer Love Hewitt and Melissa Joan Hart in Columbia's The Party. Elfman is also being considered for a role in the Ron Howard comedy Ed TV, which co-stars fellow sit-comedienne Ellen DeGeneres and former Next Big Thing Matthew McConaughey.
Get your own Free Home Page