Loni Anderson

American actress, a lush and shapely blonde with a quality of great sweetness and a high IQ. She made her mark in TV sitcoms, starting with WKRP Cincinnati from September 1978 to 1982, and Partners in Crime from September to December 1984. She joined the cast of Nurses in 1993. Anderson also did movies, including Born Yesterday (1970), in which she discovered that she could play a bimbo well.

As a kid, she had black, curly hair and a complexion so dark that she was mistaken for a black or Hispanic. While attending college at the University of Minnesota, where she began in 1963, Anderson lived with her parents and minored in theater. Around the same time, she also won a few beauty contests and did a little modeling.

She had an early marriage to Salesman Bruce Hasselberg from 1964 to 1966 that produced a daughter, Deidra Hoffman, in 1965. (Deidra eventually had a daughter, McKenzie.) Anderson's second marriage was to actor Ross Bickell on 28 January 1974; the marriage lasted for seven years.

After six years together, she married actor Burt Reynolds on 29 April 1988; they adopted son Quinton four months later. They had first met on the Merv Griffin Show in 1978. In January 1994, they entered a bitter divorce battle with custody and money fights. In 1995, the acrimony continued with the publication of her autobiography, My Life in High Heels, claiming a dozen years of abuse at the hands of Reynolds as his lover, and, later, his wife, while Reynolds in turn flaunted his extramarital affair and accused her of being a lousy mother. Under the divorce settlement, she received a $1.9 million Beverly Hills home as well as a $500,000 vacation home in North Carolina, plus $15,000 a month in child support.

In her book, Anderson did not conceal the history of her own love life, including an affair with actor John Gavin and a romance that developed into a sex addiction for her former WKRP co-star Gary Sandy.