Debra Jo Rupp
Debra Jo Rupp
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Debra Jo Rupp

Debra Jo Rupp (born February 24, 1951) is an American actress. She is best known for her starring role as Kitty Forman in the Fox sitcom That '70s Show (1998–2006) and its Netflix sequel series That '90s Show (2023–2024). Rupp also had roles in the NBC sitcom Friends (1997–1998), the ABC animated series Teacher's Pet (2000–2002) and its 2004 sequel film, the ABC sitcom Better with You (2010–2011), and the Disney+ miniseries WandaVision (2021) and its spin-off Agatha All Along (2024).

Rupp appeared in the comedy films Big (1988), Death Becomes Her (1992), Sgt. Bilko (1996), Garfield: The Movie (2004), and She's Out of My League (2010). She also starred as sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer in the plays Dr. Ruth, All the Way (2012) and Becoming Dr. Ruth (2013), the latter of which earned her a nomination for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance. She starred as Della in the play The Cake (2017–2019), for which she was nominated for the Drama League Award for Distinguished Performance.

Rupp was raised in Boxford, Massachusetts, where she attended Masconomet Regional High School, graduating in 1969.

Rupp left Massachusetts in 1979 to pursue an acting career in New York City. She frequently performed on stage and appeared in commercials before winning her first television role in 1980 as Sheila, a topless dancer, on the daytime drama All My Children. Earlier the same year, Rupp played Helen, the wife of a cheating husband, in Sharon Tipsword's one-act comedy Second Verse, produced as part of a play festival at New York's Nat Horne Theatre.

Another notable stage performance was as the young bride Eleanor in the 1985 production of A. R. Gurney's The Middle Ages at the Whole Theater Company, established by Olympia Dukakis in Montclair, New Jersey.

She garnered praise from Walter Goodman in a New York Times review of one of her many off-Broadway performances: as June Yeager, a young wife who feels she is never "loved enough", in the 1986 York Theater Company production of Arthur Laurents' dramatic play, The Time of the Cuckoo staged at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City's Upper East Side.

Rupp's list of stage credits includes appearances in Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and Cynthia Heimel's A Girl's Guide to Chaos, the Broadway role which propelled her career forward. She originated the role of Cynthia in 1986, a character based on Heimel's observations made during her stints as a columnist for Playboy and The Village Voice. Directed by Wynn Handman, and sharing the stage with Rita Jenrette, Rupp's performance as Cynthia was immortalized by legendary caricaturist Al Hirschfeld and described in a New York Times review as "an appealing mixture of pluck and pathos". In his review of Chaos, New York Newsday theater critic Allan Wallach called Rupp "a real find".

In early 1987, Rupp was featured in an article written by Enid Nemy for the "Broadway" section of The New York Times. Entitled "New York is beckoning, but first, Los Angeles", the interview revealed how Rupp's success in the theater so soon after her arrival in New York City had scared the young actress enough to take time off from acting for several years. When she returned to the stage, Rupp explained in the article, she was often cast as an ingénue; however, after her portrayal of Cynthia in Chaos, she began getting calls to audition in Los Angeles for "really crazy neurotic" parts in television pilots. Rupp was realistic about the unpredictability of an acting career and, since she had promised her mother she would never wait tables when she left for New York, she stated that she had not given up her part-time work as a bookkeeper and was "learning computers" as something to fall back on.

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