Bebe Neuwirth

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Katharine Hepburn to Kelsey Grammer's more bumbling Spencer Tracy in Cheers — a role that won her two Emmys — she has been seen most recently in the cross-generational screwball comedy Tadpole, playing a more relaxed Anne Bancroft to Aaron Stanford's more jejune Dustin Hoffman. Best of all, Bebe has charisma. Whether sitting at the corner of the bar in Cheers or swallowing a banana in Woody Allen's Celebrity, her charisma compels your attention.

The thing is, Bebe's charisma is not what everybody would call suitable for the whole family. Born on New Year's Eve to a mathematician and an artist in Newark, New Jersey, who named her Beatrice after the heroine of Dante's Paradiso, Bebe started dancing young, kept at it through Princeton High School, and carried it on into Juilliard. Working with Bob Fosse changed her dancing. He showed her how to move: how to curve her arms, bend her legs, arch her torso, and, particularly, how to thrust her pelvis in a manner at once sexual, violent, and dangerous. Bebe's charisma comes out in everything she does: singing "Big Spender" in Sweet Charity or "I Can't Do It Alone" in Chicago, seducing fifteen-year-olds in Tadpole, or twisting the knife in Frasier, her charisma is palpable.