About Lauralee Bell
Lauralee Bell always preferred to create her own opportunities rather than have them handed to her so she left the cocoon of the show she grew up on, “The Young and the Restless,” the #1 rated soap, in 2005 to try her luck in other areas. She was the female lead in her first film, “Carpool Guy,” the lead in the 2006 Lifetime movie, “Past Sins,” and one of the leads in the upcoming feature that is a prequel to an iconic film. In between, she’s raising two very active kids and owning “On Sunset,” a celebrity-friendly fashion boutique that refuses to disclose its well-heeled customer base for self-promotion. In her spare time, she’s been writing a series or two to develop as well as a book. She also guested on “CSI: Miami,” the #1 primetime show.
While “The Young and the Restless” has always been produced and taped in Hollywood since its start, the Bell family continued living in Chicago until 1986. Their roots were there and Lauralee and her two older brothers, Bill Jr., now the president of Bell-Phillip Television and Bradley, now the executive producer of “The Bold and the Beautiful,” all attended school in the Windy City. Lee Phillip Bell hosted her own television show in Chicago on the CBS affiliate, WBBM-TV. A winner of some fifteen Emmys for the program, she was one of the city’s most recognized personalities. “My mom got stopped every two seconds,” recalls a proud Lauralee, “but it wasn’t until I had kids of my own that I realized my mom is Superwoman, she was always there for us and we were unaware of her heavy workload.”
Her parents, particularly William Sr., commuted regularly between Chicago and Los Angeles. On vacations and holidays, the children were delighted to be able to accompany them, especially Lauralee who at age nine asked to be allowed to be a non-speaking extra in an episode of “The Young and the Restless.” At 13, she was rewarded with a brief scene and a few lines to speak. Succeeding trips found her in four-day and six-day efforts in what was slowly becoming a recurring role. But now she wasn’t asking -- she was being asked to do the show because of something that she had no idea she was creating: fan mail. Viewers were charmed by the guileless and natural actress -- someone they’d like their own daughters to be like. They were writing to the network to say that, at last, here was a teenager to whom their own children could relate, rather than to a slick, older actress playing the part of a teenager.
Most of the year was still spent in Chicago until the family moved to LA in 1986. Lauralee became a full-time cast member of “The Young and the Restless” as Christine “Cricket” Blair (Romalotti Williams Blair -- you know those soap marriages never last). Her castmates accepted her and the audience embraced Lauralee Bell. She was voted “Favorite Soap Opera Actress” in ‘TEEN magazine’s national poll shortly after joining the cast and in 1999 she was nominated by fans and won the Outstanding Supporting Actress Award at the “Soap Opera Awards.”
Lauralee, born December 22, 1968, lives in Los Angeles. She was the hottest daytime star in France for many years as well as their most frequent TV Guide cover subject. She guest-starred on the season finale of “Walker, Texas Ranger,” hosted television specials for E! Entertainment Television, PAX-TV and co-hosted a talk show pilot. On October 4, 1997, Lauralee married photographer Scott Martin in a storybook wedding in Santa Barbara. The couple had their first child, Christian, in January, 2001 and their second, Samantha, in October, 2002.
In 1999, during a three-month break from the show, Lauralee fulfilled a lifelong dream by opening her own clothing boutique, “On Beverly Blvd.” In Spring, 2004, Bell closed her first store and opened the even more successful, “On Sunset.” Bell’s handpicked staff at “On Sunset” act as a customer’s personal stylist and the boutique has attracted Hollywood’s elite as regular customers. Bell plans to spend this decade transforming her ideas into reality. Next project? Creating her own projects when she is not acting. And enjoying the free time now that her youngest entered kindergarten.
Posted byLauralee at 3:03 PM
Labels: Biographies, Lauralee Bell
