Elizabeth Berkley

Elizabeth Berkley (/ˈbɜːrkli/ BURK-lee) is an American actress. She played Jessie Spano in the Saved by the Bell television franchise and Nomi Malone in the controversial 1995 film Showgirls. She had supporting roles in the box office hits The First Wives Club and Any Given Sunday, as well as in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Roger Dodger.

On television, she played Julia Winston in CSI: Miami (2008–2009), Kelly Wentworth in The L Word (2009), Shannon Titus in Titus (2001–2002) and in 2020 she reprised the role of Jessie Spano in the Saved by the Bell reboot on Peacock, for which she also served as a producer. In theatre, she appeared opposite Eddie Izzard in Peter Hall's West End production of Lenny and also in the Broadway comedic play Sly Fox and the Off-Broadway production of Hurlyburly, for which she received critical acclaim. She also hosted Bravo's talent show Step It Up and Dance and in 2011 she published the New York Times best-seller Ask-Elizabeth, a self-help book for adolescent girls, which drew from the workshops she conducted for her Ask-Elizabeth program.

For Saved by the Bell she earned four Young Artist Award nominations and in 1996 she received a National Board of Review award for the ensemble acting in First Wives Club.

Elizabeth Berkley was born in Farmington Hills, Michigan to Jere and Fred Berkley. Her mother was a gift-basket business owner and her father was a lawyer. She has an older brother, Jason. Her family is Jewish and she was raised in a Conservative Jewish household, celebrating her bat mitzvah at Beth Abraham Hillel Moses in West Bloomfield. She was born with partial heterochromia iridium, a condition of differently colored irises; her right eye is half green and half brown and her left eye is green.

At age four, Berkley began taking jazz and tap lessons with Barbara Fink of Miss Barbara's Dance Center in Detroit and later took ballet classes with the professional company Dance Detroit. She would also practice at home in a room her parents set up for her in the basement. She danced Swan Lake with principals from the American Ballet Theatre and for five years she performed in the New York City Ballet holiday production of The Nutcracker in Detroit. Her dance recital song-and-tap number Hey Look Me Over eventually convinced her she wanted to be an actress.

While attending Cranbook Kingsbrook in Bloomfield Hills, she enrolled in acting and singing classes, making her theatrical debut as Snoopy in a Cranbrook Theatre production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. She continued her training with the Detroit-based company Actors Alliance and starred in two plays, Twain by the Tale and Raft of the Medusa. Professional stage roles soon followed in regional theatre, earning her an Actors Equity card when she was still in middle school. She played Baby June in the musical Gypsy (Village Players, Birmingham) and Echo in Lee Blessing's Eleemosynary at the Ann Arbor Repertory theatre. In 1980, she auditioned for the film version of Annie but was turned down because she was too tall.

She also ventured into modeling, initially doing print work for Hudson's and other regional outlets and later appearing in TV commercials for department stores in Atlanta, Milwaukee and Canada. She would use her modeling income to commute to Los Angeles and New York to train with professionals, including dancer and choreographer Joe Tremaine, vocal coach Seth Riggs and Broadway Dance Center's Frank Hatchett.

After writing a personal letter to TV producer Norman Lear asking him to make her a star, she received a reply from Lear's assistant, who encouraged her to reach out whenever she was in Los Angeles. Three years later, during a family vacation in California, she contacted his office and Lear helped her setting up with talent agent Judy Savage, of The Savage Agency. That led to her television debut in one episode of Gimme a Break! and her film debut in the critically acclaimed short film Platinum Blonde, both filmed in 1986. Berkley commuted to Los Angeles on every school break and summer vacation, taking acting classes with Diana Hill and Nora Eckstein of the recently established Young Actors Space and landing roles in Silver Spoons and the WonderWorks TV film Frog.