Chelsea Handler Movies
A brash, acerbic, by-the-throat comedienne who built a career out of skewering pop culture fixations such as
Paris Hilton and
Nicole Richie,
Chelsea Handler grew up in a devout Jewish household in New Jersey (with five siblings) and entered show business by way of stand-up comedy. In that sphere,
Handler's unapologetically blunt and occasionally self-denigrating routines both turned heads and won her a massive following; she appeared and performed in such venues as HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival and the Montreal Comedy Festival.
Handler achieved her broadest recognition, however, on television; she was a fixture on the Oxygen network's
Girls Behaving Badly (2002), a reality program in which an all-female cast set about playing outrageous,
Candid Camera-style practical jokes on unsuspecting men. The E! network subsequently signed
Handler for two eponymous programs:
The Chelsea Handler Show (2006), a loosely knit collection of skits, blackouts, mock interviews, and spoofs done with a biting edge, and a follow-up series, the after-dark
Chelsea Lately, similarly structured but more specifically devoted to sending up pop culture phenomena and developments.
On the side,
Handler also published a popular book, the tell-all My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands -- which described in graphic and comic detail the performer's entire sexual history -- and made guest appearances on network series including
The Bernie Mac Show,
Reno 911!, and
The Practice.
She gained fame as both an author and a TV personality, and also appeared in the 2012 romantic comedy This Means War, and saw her books adapted into a television series where her character was played by That 70's Show alum Laura Prepon. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi