Courteney Cox

Courteney Cox

Courteney Bass Cox , also known as Courteney Cox Arquette, is an American actress and former model, known for her role as Monica Geller in the popular television sitcom Friends and as Lucy Spiller, in the television drama Dirt.

Cox was born Courteney Bass Cox in Birmingham, Alabama to a wealthy Southern family. Her mother, also named Courteney and her late father, Richard Lewis Cox, was a contractor.Cox has two older sisters , an older brother and nine half-brothers and half-sisters. Her parents divorced in 1974, and her father eventually wound up in Panama City, Florida, where he opened a company called Cox Pools, while Cox grew up with her mother and her stepfather, New York businessman Hunter Copeland.

Cox was raised in a wealthy suburb of Birmingham, Mountain Brook, Alabama where she was known as CeCe. She attended Mountain Brook High School, where she was a cheerleader, tennis player and swimmer. Upon graduation, Cox went to study architecture and interior design at Mount Vernon College for Women. She dropped out after a year to pursue a modeling career, after being signed by the Ford modeling agency in New York City. While modeling, she also took acting classes and worked to lose her southern accent.

Cox first came to prominence in the 1984 music video for Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" (in which she was the pulled-on-stage girl who danced onstage with Springsteen for 26 seconds). Cox is also notable for being the first person to use the word "period" on U.S. television in its physiological sense, in a 1985 advertising campaign for Tampax brand tampons.Her early film roles include Masters of the Universe and Cocoon: The Return. Cox's early television work include a starring role in the short-lived television series Misfits of Science, and later a recurring role on the television series Family Ties as the last girlfriend of Alex P. Keaton. She had a supporting role as Jewel, the hard-as-nails assistant to Jim Belushi's character in the 1990 fantasy film Mr. Destiny.

Later in 1994, Cox was asked to audition for the part of Rachel Green on a new sitcom called Friends, but she was instead cast as the character Monica Geller. At first the most famous cast member of the new show, Cox joined fellow castmates Jennifer Aniston , Lisa Kudrow , Matt Le Blanc , Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer for what would become her most famous role, lasting for 10 seasons until 2004.

Between seasons, Cox married David Arquette, becoming Courteney Cox Arquette. An in-joke reference to this is made in the opening credits of the episodes The One After Vegas, where the rest of the cast and executive producers have "Arquette" added to their names. The dedication "To Courteney and David, who did get married" appears during the fade out to the tag scene.