Melissa McCarthy:
Melissa McCarthy is an American actress who was born in Plainfield, Illinois, on August 26, 1970. She is well-known for her roles that showcase her physical humor and witty, frequently risqué one-liners. McCarthy was raised in Illinois on a farm. She relocated to New York City after high school and Melissa started doing stand-up comedy at renowned venues like Stand Up New York and The Improv.
Before relocating to Los Angeles in the late 1990s and performing with the Groundlings improv troupe from 1997 to 2010, she developed her acting abilities at the Actors Studio and participated in a number of stage shows.
Melissa McCarthy had minor appearances in movies and TV series such as D.C. (2000), Samantha Who? (2007–09), Rita Rocks (2009), and Private Practice (2010) prior to securing her breakthrough role as Sookie St. James on Gilmore Girls (2000–07). She later landed a major starring role in Mike & Molly (2010–16), where she performed alongside Billy Gardell.
The show chronicles the amusing highs and lows of the lives of a man and a woman who finally get married after meeting at a Chicago Overeaters Anonymous session. The show, which Chuck Lorre co-produced, was well-received by both critics and viewers. For her portrayal, Melissa McCarthy was nominated for several Emmys and took home the prize in 2011.
After the success of Mike & Molly, Melissa McCarthy began landing even more film roles, and in 2012 she earned an Academy Award nomination for her standout supporting performance in the wild comedy Bridesmaids (2011). Melissa McCarthy soon acted in movies that demonstrated her significant box office appeal, despite the fact that her stature made her a distinct kind of leading lady by Hollywood standards. She starred as a brazen con artist in Identity Thief in 2013. Later that year, she costarred with Sandra Bullock in the buddy-cop comedy The Heat, playing a harsh Boston police officer.
Melissa McCarthy’s 2014 features included the road trip comedy Tammy and the drama-comedy St. Vincent, in which she received recognition for her nuanced portrayal of a divorced mother attempting to care for her preteen son. McCarthy and her husband, Ben Falcone, co-wrote and directed the latter; they later worked together on a number other movies. After that, she played a shy CIA analyst who turns into a full-fledged superspy to rescue the world in the 2015 film Spy.
Melissa McCarthy costarred with Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones in Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016), a reimagining of the 1984 classic about hunting ghosts and otherworldly beings. The movie received a lot of negative online reviews even before it was released in theaters, especially since the famous ghost-busting crew was recast as women. A vociferous portion of the original movie’s audience demanded a boycott and harassed the actors and producers.
Melissa McCarthy hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live in 2017 and performed a number of highly praised impersonations of then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer. She won an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her performance.
In 2018, she played a detective looking into puppet killings in the screwball comedy The Happytime killings and a recently divorced mother returning to college to finish her degree in Life of the Party. McCarthy’s portrayal of disgraced celebrity biographer Lee Israel in Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) won her praise from critics and earned her a second Oscar nod. She joins an all-female cast in the 2019 film The Kitchen, portraying mob wives who take over their husbands’ illicit businesses in 1970s New York City.
In the 2020s, McCarthy worked on a number of films, such as Superintelligence (2020), in which she portrayed a woman attempting to persuade an AI not to wipe out humanity; Thunder Force, an action-comedy about two friends who transform into superheroes and battle genetically altered mutants; and The Starling, a drama about a woman mourning the death of her child.
In the 2021 miniseries Nine Perfect Strangers, which was based on Liane Moriarty’s book, she played a distressed writer who sought assistance from an enigmatic wellness expert (Nicole Kidman). She co-starred with Falcone in the television series God’s Favorite Idiot in 2022.
The next year, McCarthy won accolades for her portrayal of the evil Ursula in the live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid, which starred Halle Bailey as Ariel. She co-starred with Jerry Seinfeld in his 2024 film Unfrosted, which was a satirical retelling of the invention of the Pop-Tart, America’s most popular breakfast treat. Additionally, McCarthy appeared as a guest on the popular Hulu series Only Murders in the Building.
In 2015, McCarthy started a fashion brand named Seven7 in addition to her acting career. She publicly denounced the phrase “plus-size” and the fashion industry’s treatment of women who wear size 14 and above, a category that encompassed almost 70% of American women, despite the collection being advertised as such. Sizes 4–28 were available in her clothes line. Seven7 was in production for a few years before closing.