Elizabeth Berkley thread

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Elizabeth Berkley (born July 28, 1972) is an American actress. She played Jessie Spano in the NBC Saturday morning television series Saved by the Bell for four years, from 1989 to 1993, and Nomi Malone in the 1995 Paul Verhoeven film Showgirls.

Berkley was born and raised in Farmington Hills, a community among Detroit's northern suburbs in affluent Oakland County, Michigan. She is the daughter of Jere, a gift-basket business owner, and Fred Berkley, a lawyer. She has an older brother, Jason. Her family is Jewish. She was raised in a Conservative Jewish household and had a bat mitzvah. She was born with partial heterochromia, the condition of differently colored irises; her right eye is half green and half brown, and her left eye is all green. She also has a mole on her forehead, which she covers with makeup, saying it led to name-calling while growing up. She graduated in 1990 from North Farmington High School in Farmington Hills after attending the Cranbrook Kingswood School, a private school in Bloomfield Hills.

From a young age, she danced, and practiced in a room her parents arranged for her in the basement. She auditioned for the lead role in the film Annie. When she became interested in pursuing dance professionally, she traveled to New York City to train with dancers and choreographers. She performed in several ballets, including Swan Lake, and in 1983, she appeared in some musicals.

Berkley was a teenage model for Elite before pursuing an acting career. She made her television debut in the 1987 television film Frog, and made a number of guest appearances on other TV shows. In 1989, at the age of 17, she auditioned for the role of Kelly Kapowski in Saved by the Bell, but the producers of the show could not decide whether to cast Tiffani-Amber Thiessen or her. In the end, they created for Berkley the character Jessie Spano, a role she played from 1989 to 1993, and in both of the show's television-film installments.

After leaving Saved by the Bell to pursue a film career, Berkley won the role of Nomi Malone, the lead character in the controversial Paul Verhoeven film Showgirls (1995). The sex- and nudity-laden film was given a NC-17 rating in the United States (the first big-budget film to receive the rating), was a box office bomb, and was widely panned by critics. Berkeley's performance received negative reviews, with Todd McCarthy describing it in Variety as "harsh, graceless and quickly tiresome", and Janet Maslin of The New York Times writing that Berkeley displayed "the open-mouthed, vacant-eyed look of an inflatable party doll." Berkley's agent subsequently dropped her, and the film's negative fallout made it hard for her to find new representation. Over the years, Showgirls has achieved cult status among film fans and ranks 36 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the Top 50 Cult Movies.