Loni Kaye Anderson (born August 5, 1945) is an American actress, best known for her role as Jennifer Marlowe on the television sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati and as a former wife of Burt Reynolds (from 1988 to 1993). Her divorce from Reynolds was a bitter, well-publicized debacle.
Anderson was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota to Carl K. Anderson and Maxine H. Kallin. As she tells it in her autobiography, My Life in High Heels, her father was originally going to name her "Leiloni", but then realized to his horror that when she got to her teen years it was liable to be twisted into "Lay Loni". So it was changed to just plain "Loni".
Shortly after her divorce from Reynolds, she appeared as a regular in the final season (1993–1994) on the NBC sitcom Nurses.
Her most famous acting role came as receptionist Jennifer Marlowe on WKRP in Cincinnati. Her pinup photo in a bikini became one of the best-selling wall posters of the 1970s.
Loni Anderson has also been in various movies. She portrayed Jayne Mansfield in a made-for-TV biopic about her along with Arnold Schwarzenegger. She teamed with Lynda Carter in the 1984 series Partners in Crime. Anderson made a series of cameo appearances on television shows in the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as the Spellmans' "witch-trash" cousin on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Vallery Irons' mother on V.I.P..
On May 17, 2008,
Loni Anderson married Bob Flick, one of the founding members of the folk band The Brothers Four.[1]
Anderson has two children: a daughter, Deidra Hoffman (from an earlier marriage), who is a school principal in Anderson, California,[citation needed] and a son, Quinton Reynolds, whom she and Burt Reynolds adopted.[2]
