Seduction: Jennifer Tilly
Tilly was born Jennifer E. Chan in Harbor City, Los Angeles. She is the first child of Harry Chan, a used car salesman, and Patricia , a Canadian schoolteacher and former stage actress. Her father was Chinese American and her mother was of Irish, Finnish, and Native-American ancestry. Following her parents’ divorce when she was five, she was raised by her mother and stepfather, John Ward, on rural Texada Island, British Columbia. Her mother divorced again when Tilly was 16, and moved to Victoria, where Tilly attended Belmont High School. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theater from Stephens College in Missouri.
Tilly had small roles in TV shows and movies beginning in 1983. She had a recurring guest role on Hill Street Blues as Gina Srignoli, a mobster’s widow who becomes romantically involved with detective Henry Goldblume. She played Frasier Crane’s seductive-but-ditzy date on an episode of the fourth season of Cheers and appeared as a similar character on the eleventh season of Frasier. She appeared as Garry’s girlfriend on It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, which aired on Showtime. She was also cast as a high end prostitute in the short lived comedy, Key West, alongside Fisher Stevens. Tilly’s breakthrough film role was as a singing waitress in The Fabulous Baker Boys in a part that was specially written for her by Steve Kloves. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as a hopelessly bad actress in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway (1994). In 1994, she also had a small role in The Getaway with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.Tilly starred in Bound, which portrays a lesbian relationship her character has with Gina Gershon. She played Samantha Cole in the Jim Carrey hit Liar Liar. In 2000’s Dancing at the Blue Iguana she played a stripper and part-time dominatrix. She portrayed gossip columnist Louella Parsons in the 2001 Peter Bogdanovich film The Cat’s Meow.
Tilly gained some additional popularity in recent years for providing voice-over work as killer doll Tiffany for two of the Child’s Play series. In the most recent installment, Seed of Chucky, she plays a dual role, providing the voice for Tiffany and also playing an exaggerated version of herself.
She is a semi-regular cast member on Family Guy, voicing the Griffin family’s neighbor, Bonnie Swanson, Joe Swanson’s wife who was pregnant for most of the show’s run until she finally had her baby during Family Guy’s current post-2005 cancellation era. She has also done vocal work for the films Monsters, Inc., Stuart Little, and Home on the Range, as well as the children’s series Hey Arnold. In Disney’s The Haunted Mansion, she portrays Madame Leota (a head in a crystal ball). She has been active in the theatre, winning a Theater World Award for her performance in the off-Broadway play One Shoe Off. She had a starring role in the series Out of Practice, which starred Henry Winkler and Stockard Channing.
The series was cancelled in May 2006. About this time, Tilly started dividing her time between her film career and professional poker. By the end of 2008, she returned to her film and television career. In 2009 Tilly made her Chinese film debut in the Christina Yao-directed Empire of Silver playing Mrs. Landdeck.On June 27, 2005, Tilly won a World Series of Poker bracelet (and $158,625) in the Ladies’ No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em event, outlasting 600 other players. She followed up this accomplishment on September 1, 2005, by also winning the third World Poker Tour Ladies Invitational Tournament held at the Bicycle Casino in Los Angeles. Tilly has appeared in the GSN Poker Royale series.[10] She appeared in the third season of Poker Superstars but was eliminated in the preliminary round. Tilly played in the Celebrity Poker Showdown which aired June 14, 2006, on Bravo.
was knocked out in third place by Bravo’s online poker champion Ida Siconolfi when her A♣ K♥ failed to improve against Ida’s starting hand of K♣ K♠. Tilly appears as a celebrity, rather than a poker pro, in ESPN’s Pro-Am Poker Equalizer. She often wears low-cut tops with push-up bras to expose lots of cleavage while playing poker. This is meant as a distraction to less serious players, saying, “the thing is, if people are really playing poker, they don’t care. Nothing looks better to them than a pair of aces. They’re not looking at your pair. They’re looking at their pair.” Tilly also appears in the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions 2007 Edition video game (along with boyfriend, Phil Laak) that was released in 2007 by Activision. In a television interview in 2005, Tilly stated that at that point in her career she was more interested in pursuing poker than acting. By December 2008, Tilly announced her retirement from poker as a career. In her monthly column in Bluff Magazine she said: “I love poker but greatness in poker is an elusive dream. There are too many variants. Trying to find validation in poker is like trying to find a virgin in a whorehouse. I’m not giving up poker entirely – gambling is an addiction after all. I’m just going to treat it more like a hobby and less like a career.” Since January 2010, she appears to have resumed her poker career. As of July 2012, Tilly’s live tournament winnings exceed $590,000. From 1984 until 1991, Tilly was married to Sam Simon, developer and producer of The Simpsons. Jennifer Tilly has an older brother, Steve, and two younger sisters, Meg and Rebecca.
