|
Cox was born Courteney Bass Cox in Birmingham, Alabama to a wealthy Southern family. Her parents were Courteney and Richard Lewis Cox, a contractor. Cox has two older sisters (Virginia McFerrin and Dottie Pickett), an older brother (Richard, Jr.) and nine half-brothers and half-sisters. Her parents divorced in 1974, and her father eventually settled 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 Mountain Brook, Alabama, a wealthy suburb of Birmingham. 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.
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 (Rachel Green), Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe Buffay), Matt LeBlanc (Joey Tribbiani), Matthew Perry (Chandler Bing) and David Schwimmer (Ross Geller) for what would become her most famous role, lasting for 10 seasons until 2004. According to the Guinness World Book of Records (2005), Cox (along with her female costars) became the highest paid TV actress of all time with her $1 million-per-episode paycheck for the tenth season of Friends.
During her time on Friends, Cox appeared in the high-profile Hollywood films Scream (1996), Scream 2 (1997) and Scream 3 (2000) as the determined and driven reporter Gale Weathers. She met her husband, David Arquette who played her on-screen love interest Dwight "Dewey" Riley, while filming the first of this trilogy.
Cox married David Arquette on June 12, 1999. On June 13, 2004, she gave birth to their first child, daughter Coco Riley Arquette. The child was originally to be named after her mother as Courteney Cox Arquette.[2] However, Arquette`s family objected to this on the grounds that naming a child after a living relative goes against Ashkenazi Jewish tradition (David Arquette is Jewish, as his mother was Jewish, however Arquette and Cox`s child is not Jewish, as Cox is not Jewish). Coco is a nickname Cox`s friends gave her mother when she was a child, calling her "Mama Coco". Jennifer Aniston is the baby`s godmother.
Between seasons 5 and 6, Cox married David Arquette and changed her name to 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
Cox`s previous significant others include Ian Copeland and a long-term relationship with actor Michael Keaton from 1989 to 1995. Cox also dated singer Adam Duritz of Counting Crows and appeared in their music video for song "A Long December" in 1997. (Duritz has also dated Cox`s Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston.)
Since 2007, Cox has starred as Lucy Spiller, a cynical tabloid editor, in Dirt, a television drama fo
|
Comments
Submit a Comment