Teri Copley

Her Blonde Mane frames sea-green eyes and painted lips. Her whispery, girlish voice sounds a bit incongruous coming from a body that's clearly all woman. Immediately, you know why comparisons to Marilyn Monroe have followed Teri Copley throughout her adult life. In fact, she's about to start a feature film, The White Rose, in which she plays a beautiful MM type. By now, Teri has learned to appreciate the comparison. "There was an innocence and intelligence to Marilyn," she says, "that I think I have, too. I would hate to be looked at as just another blonde with big breasts and a pouty mouth." Copley, of course, is best known as Mickey MacKenzie--the bubbly housekeeper who lived, quite chastely, with two young New York City bachelors in the TV sitcom We Got It Made. The show has had two incarnations, debuting on NBC in 1983 and rising again, with Teri and one new bachelor, in syndication four years later. For Teri, this appearance in Playboy is also a return engagement. She graced these pages in July 1984 as the focus of a fashion spread titled Blonde on Blonde. But that was then, and this is hotter. Her photo shoot with Contributing Photographer Richard Fegley marked the first time that the actress bared all for the camera, and she was nervous. "I'm not shy about my breasts," says Teri, "but I've never showed them off before. It took a while for Richard to coax me out of my shell." Strangely, though, her Playboy shooting parallels a situation Teri acted out in the TV movie Married a Centerfold, in which she played a character who shied away from a men's-magazine photo session until she was encouraged by her mother. "It's funny," says Teri. "When I was eighteen, someone asked my mom if I would pose nude. She wanted me to, but I said, 'No way.' I was way too shy." California-born Teri remembers her early years as difficult. She was skinny and buck-toothed. Like many an "ugly duckling," she had few friends--classmates always seemed to mistake her timidity for conceit. "In grade school, girls would want to fight with me because they thought I was stuck up. But I was just painfully shy." Finally, her body blossomed--along with her self-confidence--and Teri entertained the notion of becoming an actress. Her first break came while she was working as a waitress in a San Fernando Valley pizza joint. After reading a newspaper article about a producer who was seeking new faces for a movie, her mother phoned the producer's office, pretending to be an old friend. Amazingly, the gambit worked, and Mom managed to talk the exec into meeting with her daughter. Teri didn't get the part, but while waiting by the elevator outside the producer's office, she was spotted by an associate of Hollywood talent agent Meyer Mishkin, who signed her. That bit of kismet led to her first acting job, a small part on Fantasy Island. Next came a starring role opposite Rock Hudson in the 1981 miniseries The Star Maker, in which Hudson played a Hollywood director who molded starlets into superstars. One of them was Teri. "I loved working with Rock Hudson," she says. "He taught me about old Hollywood, offered me acting tips and even corrected my grammar! I was only nineteen and it meant a lot--he became like a father to me." Teri graduated to bigger roles in TV movies such as In the Line of Duty: The FBI Murders and did guest shots on Quantum Leap and Monsters. Her feature films include Down the Drain, a bank-robbery comedy, and Transylvania Twist, a horror send-up. She fell in love with the stage during a stint with a touring company of William Inge's Bus Stop. So enamored was she with the playwright's work that she hopes to produce a version of his play Loss of Roses early next year. "It's about a woman who believes in, and wants very much, the fairy-tale life of being loved by a good man and living in a house surrounded by a white picket fence--a house filled with children. I think the play fulfills the fantasies I have about my own life." In the meantime, Teri is filming an action/adventure film with Ken Wahl called Final Cause. At 29, she lives in Los Angeles with her two little girls, Ashley, seven, and Anastasia, three. Between her two marriages, Teri was linked in a much-publicized romance with then-single sitcom stud Tony Danza. She describes her current beau, a professional hockey player with the Montreal Canadiens, as "my best friend." It's too early to tell if he will be the man with whom she moves to a kid-filled house behind a white picket fence. But Teri knows that if this relationship doesn't last, her ideal man is out there somewhere. "I want a man who has a lot of heart," she says, "who can be giving and compassionate, yet very strong." Most of all, she wants a man who will make her the center of his universe, "who will love me unconditionally."