Danica McKellar

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Danica McKellar portraying Winnie Cooper in the final episode of The Wonder Years (1993)

Danica Mae McKellar (born January 3, 1975), is an American actress of Scottish and Portuguese descent. She is best known for her role as Winnie Cooper in the television show, The Wonder Years.

Born in La Jolla, California, McKellar and sister Crystal McKellar have maintained a friendly competition to see who gets more acting jobs. In fact, when the actress who would play Winnie had to be chosen, the last two actresses under consideration for the role were the McKellar sisters.^{[citation needed]}

Danica and her family moved to Los Angeles when she was 8. Soon after, she and her sister began acting.

McKellar studied at UCLA, majoring in mathematics, and graduated summa cum laude in 1998. She coauthored a scientific paper^[1] which appeared in a peer-reviewed physics journal. The paper proves a theorem that has come to be known as the Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem^[2]. This paper makes her one of the very few people, and perhaps the only full-time acting professional besides Natalie Portman, with a finite Erdos-Bacon number. Referring to the mathematical abilities of McKellar and her fellow student Brandy Winn, one of her math teachers, Professor Lincoln Chayes, was quoted in the New York Times^[3] as saying, "I thought that the two were really, really first rate". McKellar even provides free online math tutoring for her fans at her official internet website. While a student at UCLA, she was a sister of the Alpha Delta Pi sorority.

Since then, she has had several guest roles in television series (including one with former co-star Fred Savage on Working), and has written and directed two short films. She briefly returned to regular television with a recurring role in the 2002-03 season of The West Wing.

She appeared in lingerie for a pictorial for the July 2005 edition of Stuff Magazine [2].

An Australian Hip-Hop act, The Winnie Coopers, named themselves after her well known character from The Wonder Years.

Danica McKellar has also lent her voice to the character Jubilee for the video game X-Men Legends and Invisible Woman for the video game Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.

In June 2006 Lifetime Television announced that McKellar will star in a Lifetime movie and web-based series titled Inspector Mom about a mother who solves mysteries. [3] In an interview in the November 17, 2006 issue of TV Guide, McKellar said that two TV movies and ten webisodes of Inspector Mom were being produced.[4]

[edit] Acting credits

The Twilight Zone (as Debbie Dobs) 1985-1986
Volkswagen commercial, 1986
Wide World Of Kids, (as herself), 1987-1990
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, (as Patty the Sad-Eyed Orphan), 1989
The Wonder Years, 1988-1993
No More Rhyme (Deborah Gibson video) 1989
Camp Cucamonga (TV movie, as Lindsey Scott) 1990
Captain Planet and the Planeteers (animated, voice only) 1992
Sidekicks (feature movie, as Lauren) 1993
Babylon 5 (in "The War Prayer" as Aria Tensus) 1994
Walker, Texas Ranger (played Lori in one episode) 1994
Cradle Of Conspiracy (tv movie, she also played Lori) 1994
Sirens, 1994
Justice For Annie (tv movie, as Annie) 1995
Working (Jolie in two episodes) 1997
Love Boat: The Next Wave (played a nun in one episode) 1997
Happy Hour (as herself) 1999
Grease (play) (as Rizzo) 1999
Static Shock (as Frieda) 2000-2004
Path of Destruction 2005
The West Wing 2002-2003

[edit] References

^ Chayes, L., McKellar, D. & Winn, B. (1998) Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin–Teller models on $\mathbb{Z}^2$ . Journal of Physics A: Mathematics and General, 31, 9055–9063. Full text as PDF
^ USNews.com. USNews.com: America's Best Colleges 2006: College Flashback: Danica McKellar. 2006. [1]
^ Kenneth Chang, "Between Series, an Actress Became a Superstar (in Math)," New York Times, July 19, 2005.