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Born 23 August 1949, Fort Wayne
The tie: Shelley Long was born in Fort Wayne on August 23, 1949, in the Indian Village neighborhood, and raised here — Kekionga Junior High School, then South Side High School. The tie is a full hometown tie, and it produced a documented pre-career distinction: while at South Side, Long won the National Forensic League's national championship in Original Oratory in 1967 — competitive public speaking, the schoolroom ancestor of the timing her comedy later ran on. Her full profile is in the People record; this entry carries the comedy career.
The career: Long studied drama at Northwestern University and left before graduating, working in Chicago before her screen career began; summaries of her pre-fame years sometimes attach an Emmy-winning local program to this period, and the record should be plain that the program in question belonged to her Chicago years — no Fort Wayne broadcast credit for Long appears in the record reached. Her film comedy began with Night Shift (1982). The defining role came the same year: Diane Chambers, the waitress-intellectual of NBC's Cheers, which she played from 1982 to 1987 and reprised in the 1993 finale. The documented reception is the strongest in this section after Lombard's: the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 1983, five Emmy nominations for the role in all, and two Golden Globe Awards, in 1983 and 1985. Her film comedy continued through Irreconcilable Differences (1984) and Outrageous Fortune (1987) to The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), where she played Carol Brady — a Fort Wayne-born actress carrying, in two different decades, two of American television comedy's signature households.
Sources:
- Shelley Long, biographical record as carried by Wikipedia and the Emmy Awards record — the Fort Wayne birth of August 23, 1949, in Indian Village; Kekionga and South Side schools; the 1967 National Forensic League national championship in Original Oratory; Northwestern; Cheers 1982–87 and the 1993 finale; the 1983 Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, five nominations for the role, and the Golden Globes of 1983 and 1985; Night Shift, Outrageous Fortune, and The Brady Bunch Movie.
- People section of this history — Long's Fort Wayne profile, carried there and cross-referenced here by agreement.