Teri Hatcher

Teri Lynn Hatcher (born December 8, 1964) is an American actress best known for her portrayals of Lois Lane on the television series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993–1997); Paris Carver in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997); and Susan Mayer on the television series Desperate Housewives (2004–2012), for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy and three Screen Actors Guild Awards (one as lead female actor, two as part of Best Ensemble), and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.

Hatcher was born on December 8, 1964, in Palo Alto, California, the only child of Esther (née Beshur), a computer programmer who worked for Lockheed Martin, and Owen Walker Hatcher, Jr., a nuclear physicist and electrical engineer. Her father is of English, Welsh and Irish descent (Hatcher has said that he also has Choctaw ancestry), and her mother is of Syrian, Czech and Irish ancestry.

Hatcher took ballet lessons at the San Juan School of Dance in Los Altos and grew up in Sunnyvale, California. At De Anza College she studied mathematics and engineering.

In March 2006, she alleged that she was sexually abused from the age of five by Richard Hayes Stone, an uncle by marriage who was later divorced by Hatcher's aunt. She said her parents were unaware of the abuse. In 2002, she assisted Santa Clara County prosecutors with their indictment of Stone for a more recent sexual offense that led his female victim to commit suicide at 14. Stone pleaded guilty to four counts of child sexual abuse and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Hatcher said she told the prosecutors about her own abuse because she was haunted by thoughts of the 14-year-old girl who shot herself, and feared Stone might escape conviction. Stone died of colon cancer on August 19, 2008, after serving six years of his sentence.