Spelling, Tori

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Spelling, Tori

Actress

B orn Victoria Davey Spelling, May 16, 1973, in Los Angeles, CA; daughter of Aaron (a television producer) and Candy (an actress) Spelling; married Charlie Shanian (an actor), July 3, 2004 (divorced, April, 2006); married Dean McDermott (an actor), May 7, 2006; children: Liam (from second marriage).

Addresses: Office—c/o Oxygen Media, LLC, 75 9th Ave., New York, NY 10011.

Career

A ctress on television, including:Saved by the Bell, NBC, 1990-91; Beverly Hills, 90210, FOX, 1990-2000; So Downtown, WB, 2003; So NoTORIous, VH1, 2006; Tori & Dean: Inn Love, Oxygen, 2007—. Has also appeared in television movies, including: Shooting Stars, 1983; The Three Kings, 1987; A Friend to Die For, 1994; Awake to Danger, 1995; Deadly Pursuits, 1996; CoEd Call Girl, 1996; Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?, 1996; Alibi, 1997; Way Downtown, 2002; A Carol Christmas, 2003; Family Plan, 2005; Hush, 2005; Mind Over Murder, 2006; Housesitter, 2007. Film appearances include: Troop Beverly Hills, 1989; The House of Yes, 1997; Scream 2, 1997; Trick, 1999; Scary Movie 2, 2001; Sol Goode, 2001; Evil Alien Conquerors, 2002; Naked Movie, 2002; Starring, 2003; 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, 2004; Cthulhu, 2007; Kiss the Bride, 2008.

Sidelights

T ori Spelling grew up in the public eye as thedaughter of the most prolific producer in television history, Aaron Spelling. Spelling followed her father into the business, but endured the barbs of critics who claimed she won her role on the long-running FOX series Beverly Hills, 90210 simply because her father was the show’s producer. Once she reached her thirties, Spelling found her niche as a reality-television personality who proved confident enough to mock her status as the quintessential spoiled California blonde. She appeared in a VH1 series called So NoTORIous, and then on an Oxygen cable channel series that followed her and her new husband, Dean McDermott, as they struggled to renovate a California bed & breakfast.

Spelling was born Victoria Davey Spelling on May 16, 1973, in Los Angeles, the first child of television producerAaron Spelling and his wife, Candy.Aaron Spelling had been working in the entertainment industry since the early 1950s, moving from acting to writing to producing, and during Spelling’s childhood his talent for creating hit shows began to pay off. Series produced by his company would come to dominate the prime-time television lineup for much of the 1970s and ’80s. They included Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, and Dynasty, all of which made Spelling’s father one of the most powerful—and wealthiest—figures in American network television. The family, which included her younger brother Randy, lived in a palatial estate that was the largest private residence in the state of California, at 56,000 square feet and 123 rooms.

The Spellings were Jewish, but also celebrated Christmas, and their father—who had grown up in desperately poor circumstances—lavished attention and luxuries on them, including having snow brought in from the mountains via refrigerated trucks so that they could build snowmen on their lawn on Christmas morning. As an adult, Spelling admitted she was embarrassed by her family’s affluence, and said that even in affluent Beverly Hills she was teased at school. A bashful child, she was known to hide behind her mother’s skirts when company came, but found she had no fear when she performed impromptu numbers at her parents’ extravagant soirees.

Spelling told her father that she wanted to act, and she landed her first part in one of his series, Vega$, at the age of seven. She went on to small parts in other Spelling productions, including Fantasy Island and The Love Boat, and at age ten appeared in the first of several television movies that would become the mainstay of her career. As a teen, she attended Beverly Hills High School for a time, but graduated from a private academy, the Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood. She made her feature-film debut in Troop Beverly Hills in 1989, a Shelley Long comedy. A year later, she was cast in a few episodes of the NBC sitcom Saved by the Bell.

Spelling wrote poetry and even a play during her teen years, and planned on studying English and theater in college; however, before she began classes, she auditioned for the pilot episode of a new series her father was producing, Beverly Hills, 90210, and was given a small part. When the pilot was picked up by the FOX Network, Spelling put her college plans on hold. The hour-long drama initially began as a satire of wealthy high schoolers much like Spelling and her friends, but quickly abandoned its tongue-in-cheek humor for more straightforward drama. Spelling was cast as Donna Martin, a dim, rich teenager whose careful safeguarding of her virginity became a major story arc over the first few seasons.

Critics savaged Beverly Hills, 90210—along with Spelling’s acting abilities—but the series was a hit with teens and young adults alike, and she and her fellow castmates all became household names in the early 1990s. The show ran for a decade, and followed the characters through their college years, with typically over-the-top storylines that were a hallmark of her father’s television hits. Spelling was happy to be earning her own money from the successful series, and moved out of her parents’ immense house to her own apartment, telling Andrew Billen in Britain’s Observer newspaper that she enjoyed “being somewhere where I can see the whole place from a chair.”

Spelling’s real-life romantic foibles were well-documented by the tabloid press. For a two-year period she was linked with Nick Savalas, son of actor Telly Savalas, a relationship she later characterized as detrimental to her self-image. “He was never physically abusive, but he was verbally abusive, telling me ten times a day how ugly I was,” she told Entertainment Weekly’s Dana Kennedy a few years later. “I cried all the time. ” Spelling’s self-image issues were further exacerbated by fan sites for Beverly Hills, 90210 in the earliest years of the Internet, where devotees of the series speculated about her fluctuating weight and whether or not she had undergone breast-augmentation surgery.

Beverly Hills, 90210 ended its run in 2000, but by then Spelling had already become a staple of the made-for-television drama, starring in small-screen movies with titles like Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? and CoEd Call Girl. She scored surprisingly good reviews for two independent films, one called the The House of Yes in 1997 that starred Parker Po-sey as a Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis-obsessed young woman from a wealthy Virginia family. Spelling’s character was a donut-shop waitress whose visit to her new fiancé’s home showcases the family’s rather unwholesome relationships. “Casting Spelling as the fiancée was an inspired stroke, as [audiences] already associate her with a certain cluelessness,” wrote Dennis Harvey in Variety, “but she’s quite good, as Lesly gradually reveals a surprising determination beneath her squarer-than-square surface.” She also earned good reviews for a role in Trick in 1999, a gay comedy that bolstered her already-substantial fan base among gay men.

Spelling had a difficult time moving forward with her career, however, and seemed to be relegated to parts in the television movies she had once claimed to be avoiding. She was told her face was too recognizable for sitcoms, explaining in one interview that “on network pilots, they can’t picture me being hard up and being a waitress,” she joked with Kate Au-rthur of the New York Times, “but Lifetime viewers are totally O.K. with me being an Olympian skier.”

On July 3, 2004, Spelling married actor Charlie Shanian in a lavish wedding at her parents’ estate that cost an estimated $1 million; however, the following summer she met Canadian-born actor Dean McDermott in Ottawa when both were cast in the television movie Mind Over Murder, and the two fell in love. Three weeks later, both flew back to Los Angeles and shortly thereafter announced their separation from their respective spouses. The fact that McDermott was the father of one son and in the process of adopting a second child further fueled the tabloid coverage of the romance, but as Spelling told Michelle Tauber in People, “I feel sorry for people who meet The One and let it pass them by. You’re doing not just yourself an injustice, but you’re doing the person you’re with an injustice. We knew we were meant to be together.”

Her divorce from Shanian finalized in April of 2006. Weeks later, Spelling married McDermott in a ceremony that was in marked contrast to her first wedding—on a beach in Fiji, with no friends or family members present. Spelling had been estranged from her mother for several months by then in another facet of her life that was faithfully chronicled in the tabloid press. In some media reports, the rift was linked to a friendship her mother had with the man who had once introduced Aaron and Candy, but in other accounts the difficulties were said to stem from Spelling’s new reality show on VH1, So NoTORIous, which began airing in the spring of 2006.

So NoTORIous was a send-up of the reality-television genre and of Spelling’s own celebrity, with television cameras following her on a daily routine in Los Angeles. Some aspects of the portrayal were close to her actual life, but the series was actually scripted. Her father was represented by a voice over a speakerphone—much like the famous Charlie of Charlie’s Angels, the boss who was never seen on the series—while her television mother, called Kiki, was played by Loni Anderson; Candy Spelling was said to have been irate about the character, who was ob-sessed with shopping. That relationship was one of the reasons So NoTORIous landed on VH1, though it had been originally filmed as an NBC pilot. “Networks want them to have this contentious relationship, and then at the end, tie it up in a neat bow,” she explained to Aurthur in the New York Times interview. “But that’s not reality. Reality is that a lot of mother-daughters have a relationship where they love each other, of course, but they just can’t get there.”

Reality television seemed to suit Spelling much better than any other format, giving her a chance to display her comedic talents and hone her skills as a producer. Making fun of herself, she enthused, was “really freeing. I’ve been a target my entire life. At this point, there’s nothing anyone can say that will faze me,” she told Ulrica Wihlborg in People, adding that for the So NoTORIous launch party, the planners told her they wanted to hire drag queens who modeled themselves after her. “They were like, ‘Does that offend you?’” she told Wihlborg. “Of course it doesn’t offend me! There’s this famous drag queen called Suppositori Spelling. I’m like, ‘You have to find her!’”

In June of 2006, Aaron Spelling died of complications following a stroke. Spelling was in Toronto on location at the time, and learned of his death from a text message sent to her by a friend, who had heard it on the news. Once again, the tabloid press wondered why Spelling had not been at her father’s bedside, but she said she had not been warned that her father was so close to death. The real-life drama intensified when Candy Spelling, the executor of her late husband’s $300 million estate, gave both Spelling and her son just $800,000 each as their inheritance. However, the pair were reconciled a year later when Spelling’s first child, Liam Aaron McDermott, was born, and Candy Spelling established a multimillion-dollar trust in her grandson’s name.

By that point, Spelling and McDermott were starring in their own reality series, Tori & Dean: Inn Love, which began airing on the Oxygen cable channel in March of 2007. The first season followed them as they struggled to renovate a bed & breakfast inn they had leased in Fallbrook, California, about two hours south of Los Angeles. The second season introduced their infant son as Spelling and McDermott began to tire of innkeeping and sought new sources of income. In early 2008, the couple announced they were expecting a second child. Spelling was busy writing an autobiography, also expected later in 2008. Interviewed by Hadley Freeman in London’s Guardian a few months after becoming a mother, Spelling reflected on her own storied childhood and the fact that she—unlike so many among a newer generation of moneyed star-lets—had avoided trouble with the law or well-publicized substance abuse travails. “My parents in-stilled great values in us,” she told Freeman. “I mean, yeah, we had an extravagant lifestyle, but they taught us to be nice, be honest, work hard, and that always stayed with us.”