Jenny McCarthy

Jennifer Ann McCarthy-Wahlberg (' McCarthy'''; born November 1, 1972) is an American actress, model, and television personality.

McCarthy was born on November 1, 1972, at Little Company of Mary Hospital located in the southwest Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, Illinois.

She was born to a working-class Catholic family, and has German, Irish, and Polish ancestry.

She lived in the West Elsdon neighborhood of Chicago.

She is the second of four daughters – her sisters are named Lynette, Joanne, and Amy; actress Melissa McCarthy is her cousin.

McCarthy's mother, Linda, was a housewife and courtroom custodian, and her father, Dan McCarthy, was a steel mill foreman.

As a teenager McCarthy attended Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School, whose school sweater she donned in the pages of Playboy, and was a cheerleader at both Brother Rice High School and St. Laurence High School, although she has referred to herself as an "outcast" at her school and has said she was repeatedly bullied by classmates.

She spent two years at Southern Illinois University.

She began her career in 1993 as a nude model for Playboy magazine and was later named their Playmate of the Year.

In 1993, Playboy magazine offered McCarthy $20,000 to pose for its October issue.

McCarthy became the Playmate of the Month for October 1993.

Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner cites McCarthy's "wholesome Catholic girl" persona as the unique quality for which she was selected out of 10,000 applicants.

Her layout emphasized her Catholic upbringing with a schoolgirl theme.

According to McCarthy, the pictorial caused an uproar in her Catholic neighborhood, and resulted in her house being pelted with eggs, her sisters being taunted at school, and McCarthy, who counted Catholic nuns among her aunts, being lectured about her future damnation by those close to her.

McCarthy was later made the Playmate of the Year, and was paid a $100,000 salary.

In 1994, because of her newfound public attention, McCarthy moved to Los Angeles and, for a time, hosted Hot Rocks, a Playboy TV show featuring uncensored music videos.

McCarthy then had a television and film acting career, beginning as a co-host on the MTV game show Singled Out (1995–1997) and afterwards starring in the eponymous sitcom Jenny (1997–1998), as well as films including BASEketball (1998), Scream 3 (2000), Dirty Love (2005), John Tucker Must Die (2006), and Santa Baby (2006).

In 1995, when MTV chose McCarthy to co-host a new dating show called Singled Out, she left Hot Rocks.

Her job as a co-host was a success, and Playboy wanted her to do more modeling.

That same year she also appeared at World Wrestling Federation (WWF) pay-per-view event WrestleMania XI as a guest valet for villain Shawn Michaels, who faced heroic WWF Champion, Diesel.

She left after the match with the victor, Diesel.

In 1996, she landed a small part in the comedy The Stupids.

In 1997, McCarthy launched two shows.

The first one was an MTV sketch comedy show The Jenny McCarthy Show, which was sufficiently popular for NBC to sign her for an eponymous sitcom later that year, Jenny.

Also in 1997, she appeared on one of two covers for the September issue of Playboy (the other cover featured Pamela Anderson).

McCarthy also released an autobiography: Jen-X: Jenny McCarthy's Open Book.

In 1998, McCarthy's first major movie role was alongside Trey Parker and Matt Stone in the comedy BASEketball.

The following year, she starred in Diamonds.

In 2000, she had a role in the horror movie Scream 3, and three years later she parodied that role in horror film spoof Scary Movie 3 along with fellow Playmate and actress Anderson.

In 2005, McCarthy produced, wrote, and starred in the film Dirty Love, which was directed by her husband at the time, John Asher.

In March 2006, she was given Razzie Awards for Worst Actress, Worst Screenplay, and Worst Picture for her work on Dirty Love, which also earned Asher a Razzie for "Worst Director".

In addition to her early TV fame on MTV and her short-lived, self-titled NBC sitcom, McCarthy has guest-starred in a variety of other television shows, including Stacked, Charmed, The Drew Carey Show, Wings, Fastlane, Two and a Half Men and Just Shoot Me!.

McCarthy returned to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE, formerly the WWF) on the August 2, 2008 Saturday Night's Main Event XXXVI to thank the fans for supporting Generation Rescue, an autism advocacy organization.

In 2013, she hosted her own television talk show The Jenny McCarthy Show, and became a co-host of the ABC talk show The View, appearing on the program until 2014.

Since 2019, McCarthy has been a judge on the Fox musical competition show The Masked Singer.

McCarthy has written several books about parenting and has promoted research into environmental causes and alternative medical treatments for autism.

She has promoted the disproven idea that vaccines cause autism, and said that chelation therapy, a quack remedy, helped cure her son of autism.

McCarthy's proselytization of these views has been called "dangerous", "reckless", and "uninformed".

She has been described by journalists as "the nation's most prominent purveyor of anti-vaxxer ideology" and "the face of the anti-vaxx movement".

She disputes the anti-vaccine label saying she prefers the term "pro-safe-vaccine-schedule", a term that has met strong criticism.