AllMovie

The inspiration for over a dozen web shrines, B-movie queen and pop diva Kari Wuhrer has built an expansive list of credits since debuting in the early '80s. Born in Brookfield, CT, to Andrew, a police officer turned salesman, and Karin, a payroll accountant, Wuhrer began her career by singing in local talent contests. As a teenager, she would sneak into Manhattan to play with her punk rock band, Freudian Slip. She also began taking acting classes and persuaded her mother to take her to an audition for Ford Modeling Agency's Talent Division. The company signed her on the spot. She started appearing in commercials, and later juggled her acting roles with drama classes at N.Y.U.'s Tisch School of the Arts and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. After making her film debut in Fire With Fire (1986), Wuhrer became an MTV veejay and the co-host of network's quiz show Remote Control. She then paid her own way out to Hollywood to make a cameo in the Andrew Dice Clay vehicle The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (1990). Wuhrer eventually settled in Los Angeles, appearing in Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time (1991) and landing a guest spot on Fox's Married With Children. Her own 1993 Fox series, Class of '96, failed to attract viewers, but the network still hired Wuhrer to bed Brian Austin Green in two episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 in 1994. That same year, she began landing more substantial roles, acting opposite Jack Nicholson in Sean Penn's The Crossing Guard and Laurence Fishburne in John Singleton's Higher Learning (1995). Wuhrer played a gypsy in Stephen King's Thinner (1996), before increasing her fan base exponentially when she joined the cast of the sci-fi series Sliders in 1997. While portraying sultry Maggie Beckett on the hit show, she appeared with Jennifer Lopez in Anaconda (1997) and David Schwimmer in Kissing a Fool (1998), as well as headlined numerous B-films, straight-to-video releases, and television movies. In 1999, Wuhrer, who sang and composed songs for several soundtracks, released her first album. Entitled Shiny, it boasted the popular single "There's a Drug." The new millennium saw Wuhrer leaving Sliders and lending her talents (and internet following) to the computer game series Command & Conquer, starring as Agent Tanya in Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge. She made two guest appearances on CBS's CSI and appeared in a string of B-pictures and independent pictures, including Spider's Web (2001), The Rose Technique (2001), The Medicine Show (2001), Berserker (2001), and Malevolent (2002). A veteran of over 40 screen roles, Wuhrer then cashed in on her cult status for Centropolis Entertainment's big-budget homage to low-budget creature flicks, Eight Legged Freaks (2002) -- proving that she had both wit and staying power.