Cybill Shepherd
A: Cybill Shepherd, the former cover model who became a film star who then became a sitcom star, is in the midst of the longest, quietest phase of her phoenix-like career: freelance star for hire.
Her resume is basically a series of fast rises to prominence and equally fast falls from it. But after recovering from the last drop — after the cancelation of her once-celebrated sitcom “Cybill” in 1998 — she’s now settled into a more sustainable kind of profile. She pops up in sitcoms and TV movies every so often, but always in a featured role that befits her fame.
Her most recent gig, for example, was the Lifetime movie “How to Murder Your Husband” (2023), a very notable film by Lifetime standards. It co-starred fellow ‘80s icon Steve Guttenberg (“Police Academy,” 1984) and was based on the true story of a novelist convicted of killing her own husband in a way that was reminiscent of the plots of her books. Prior to that, she popped up in one episode of the buzzy Paramount+ drama “Guilty Party” in 2021, playing the protagonist’s mother.
Those are the kinds of roles that have characterized this phase in her career: They’re not landing her on the front pages of the trade magazines, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Those front pages haven’t always been kind.
After she shot to fame in the ‘70s with leads in classics “The Last Picture Show” (1971) and “Taxi Driver” (1976), those entertainment magazines found glee in writing about the series of flops that followed. The cycle repeated itself a decade later when, after returning to the spotlight in hit series “Moonlighting” and “Cybill,” she fell from grace again, with reports of difficult on-set behavior.
With all that behind her, a calmer career phase filled with lower-profile, well-received performances is probably a welcome change.