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Shelley Lee Long (born August 23, 1949) is an American actress. Long was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana on August 23,1949 at 7:00 am on Tuesday. The daughter of Evandine, a school teacher, and Leland Long, who worked in the rubber industry before becoming a teacher. She was active on her high school speech team, and in 1967 she won the National Forensic League National Championship in Original Oratory. She delivered a speech on the need for sex education in high school entitled "Sex Perversion Weed." After graduating from South Side High School in Fort Wayne, she studied drama at Northwestern University, but left before graduating to pursue a career in acting and modelling. Her first break as an actress occurred when she began doing commercials in the Chicago area for a furniture company called Homemakers.

Although she had been in feature films, Long became famous as the character Diane Chambers in the long-running television sitcom Cheers. The show was slow to capture an audience but eventually became one of the most popular on the air and made Long a sought-after actress for films. In 1984, she was nominated for a Best Leading Actress Golden Globe for her performance in Irreconcilable Differences. She then appeared in a series of comedies, such as The Money Pit starring Tom Hanks (1986), Outrageous Fortune with Bette Midler and Peter Coyote (1987) and Hello Again with Corbin Bernsen (1987). Long achieved her greatest success in quite a while as mom Carol Brady in the 1995 hit film The Brady Bunch Movie, a campy take on the popular television show. In 1996, she reprised her role in A Very Brady Sequel, which had more modest success. A series of ventures followed such as the made for TV remake of Freaky Friday, and the family sitcom Kelly Kelly, which only lasted for a few episodes. She played the Wicked Witch of the Beanstalk in a 1997 episode of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.

In 1979, Long met securities broker Bruce Tyson. They married in 1981 and had a daughter Juliana on March 27, 1985. Long and Tyson separated in 2003 and divorced in 2004. In November 2004, as reported by multiple news outlets, including Fox News, Long was rushed to the hospital after an overdose of painkillers. As part of her comeback, in January 2009, Long is scheduled to open the San Francisco company of the musical Wicked as Madame Morrible for a limited engagement.

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