Known As: Jenny McCarthy
Birth Name: Jennifer McCarthy
Birthday: November 01, 1973
Zodiac Sign: Scorpio
Birth Place: Chicago, Illinois, USA
Body Measurement: B97cm W61cm H86cm
Height: 169cm
Shoes Size: 8(US)
Relations: Husband - John Asher (director)
Education: Illinois University at Carbondale, Nursing
Occupation: Actress, Model, TV Personality
Jenny McCarthy has a great personality. Her vivacious
charisma, snappy banter, and amusing facial expressions
on MTV's Singled Out, a hyper-charged nineties version
of The Dating Game, made the should-be stupid game show
somehow bearable--nay, hypnotic.
In 1992, Jenny McCarthy was scrambling for funds to
finance her second year of nursing studies at Southern
Illinois University. She decided to start a modeling
career, only to be told she was too curvy. She realized
that Playboy prefers full-figured women, and hand-delivered
her photos to the magazine's Chicago office. The editors
liked them and paid Jenny $20,000 to pose as Miss October
1993.
A few months later, she won the Playmate of the Year
title and $100,000 in cash and prizes. Then she moved
from her native Chicago (where she grew up with three
sisters, a stay-at-home mom, and her father, a steel-plant
foreman) to Los Angeles in search of stardom. Hollywood
auditions proved difficult to come by, and it took incessant
badgering from Ray Manzella, her fourty-seven-year-old
manager and live-in boyfriend, to land an interview
at MTV. The network's producer appreciated Jenny and
hired her to co-host Singled Out, which debuted in the
summer of 1995. Funny, telegenic, and curvy Jenny McCarthy
had an immediate success. MTV was eager to retain its
hot property and coughed up a $500,000, one-year contract
that promotes McCarthy to full-fledged VJ and gives
her carte blanche to create a program of any format
that best suits her talents.
Jenny opted to turn over her host responsibilities
on Singled Out to Carmen Electra, and concentrate her
attention on creating an MTV sketch-variety series,
"The Jenny McCarthy Show", which is, in her
words, "kind of like Lifestyles of the Rich and
Famous on acid." She developed another sitcom for
NBC, in which she is an East Coaster who inherits a
Hollywood mansion and gets a job as a movie star's personal
assistant. Playboy offered $500,000 to snap more nude
photos. When McCarthy demurred, claiming that this was
not the career path she was presently pursuing, the
magazine settled for rerunning old pics. Although she
also declined proposals from Fox and NBC, McCarthy is
nonetheless venturing beyond teen-oriented cable channels
and gentlemen's magazines. She appeared as "blonde
nurse" in Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead
(1995) and, later, portrayed her first substantive screen
character (a neurotic movie star) in The Stupids (1996),
opposite Tom Arnold. It seems McCarthy is heeding and
exceeding advice that her mother proffered years ago:
"Be like Vanna White."