Jenny McCarthy

Jennifer Ann McCarthy-Wahlberg (née McCarthy; born November 1, 1972) is an American actress, model, television personality, and anti-vaccine activist. She began her career in 1993 as a nude model for Playboy magazine and was later named their Playmate of the Year.

McCarthy went on to have a television and film acting career, beginning as a co-host on the MTV dating game show Singled Out (1995–1997) and afterwards starring in the eponymous sitcom Jenny (1997–1998). Her film roles include BASEketball (1998), Scream 3 (2000), Dirty Love (2005), John Tucker Must Die (2006), and Santa Baby (2006). In 2013, she hosted her own television talk show The Jenny McCarthy Show. From 2013 to 2014, she was a co-host of the ABC talk show The View. Since 2019, McCarthy has been a judge on the Fox musical competition 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.

Early life

McCarthy was born on November 1, 1972, at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. 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. Her parents, Dan and Linda McCarthy of Orland Park, encouraged all of their kids to be active in high school sports: Lynette ran track; Jenny played softball; and both Amy and Joanne chose basketball. The sisters did gymnastics and bowling as youths. 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.

Career

Modeling, acting and broadcasting

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 cited 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.

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 the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) pay-per-view event WrestleMania XI as a guest valet for Shawn Michaels in his match against WWF Champion, Diesel. She left after the match with the victorious Diesel. McCarthy returned to the promotion, now renamed WWE on the August 2, 2008 Saturday Night's Main Event XXXVI to thank the fans for supporting Generation Rescue, a non-profit organization that promoted the scientifically disproven view that there is a causal link between vaccines and autism and claimed autistic children could "recover" with treatment. 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!. She was the voice of Six in the third season of Canadian animated science-fiction cartoon Tripping the Rift. In 2005, McCarthy hosted a show on E! called Party at the Palms. The reality show, which was filmed at The Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, featured hotel guests, party goers, and celebrities.

McCarthy has continued her work with Playboy over the years, both as a model and in other capacities. She appeared on the cover of the magazine's January 2005 issue wearing a leopard skin version of the company's iconic "bunny suit" and was featured in a pictorial shot at Elvis Presley's Graceland mansion in that same issue. She was the second woman (following Carmen Electra) and first former Playmate to become a celebrity photographer for the Playboy Cyber Club, where she photographed model Jennifer Madden.

Her younger sister, Amy McCarthy, also has posed for Playboy. She was Cyber Girl of the Week for September 27, 2004, and Cyber Girl of the Month for January 2005.

In 2007, McCarthy starred in a five-episode online series, called In the Motherhood, along with Chelsea Handler and Leah Remini. The show aired on MSN and was based on being a mother where users could submit their stories to have it made into real webisodes.

She also appeared in two video games: playing the role of Agent Tanya in the video game Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, replacing Kari Wührer, and the fitness video game Your Shape Featuring Jenny McCarthy.

On December 31, 2010, McCarthy began her decade-long tenure as correspondent in Times Square for ABC's Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest. Until her marriage, McCarthy was known for kissing a member of the U.S. Armed Forces at the stroke of midnight; the kiss was reserved for her husband after her marriage. In 2020, she chose not to participate in this event.

She was the host of season 2 of Love in the Wild, which aired in the summer of 2012 on NBC.

She was on the cover of Playboy in the July/August 2012 issue after saying she wanted to pose for it again before her 40th birthday.

In 2013, McCarthy appeared in a series of commercials for Blu electronic cigarettes.

After 17 guest appearances, in July 2013, McCarthy was announced as a new co-host on ABC's The View, replacing former co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck. To tone down her looks, McCarthy always wore glasses on the show. Barbara Walters praised McCarthy's intelligence, warmth, humor and fresh point of view, and calling her a great addition to the show. She debuted as a co-host on September 9, 2013. The departures of McCarthy and co-host Sherri Shepherd from The View were announced in June 2014. The Wrap reported that ABC had decided not to renew McCarthy's contract. In an interview with Access Hollywood, McCarthy denied being fired from the show.

McCarthy became a SiriusXM series host of a show called Dirty, Sexy, Funny with Jenny McCarthy on October 27, 2014. The title of the show was changed to The Jenny McCarthy Show on July 12, 2016.

She is one of the panelists on The Masked Singer. The show premiered on January 2, 2019.