Sherri Shepherd life and biography

Sherri Evonne Shepherd is an American comedienne, actress, and television personality. She is one of five co-hosts on the ABC daytime talkshow, The View, as well as being the current host of the Newlywed Game and having a recurring role as Angie Jordan on the NBC series 30 Rock. As an actress, she has starred in the sitcom Less Than Perfect and her own sitcom Sherri on Lifetime.

Shepherd worked a day job as a legal secretary while doing stand-up comedy at night. Her first TV role was on the show, Cleghorne!, starring former Saturday Night Live cast member Ellen Cleghorne. Three years later, Shepherd pursued acting and stand-up comedy full-time, working again as a legal secretary for a day job. She had guest and recurring roles on Everybody Loves Raymond and Living Single as well as regular roles on Suddenly Susan and The Jamie Foxx Show. Perhaps her most successful role prior to The View was playing the main character of Ramona Platt (2002–2006) on the comedy Less than Perfect. She is currently starring in Lifetime Television's Sherri, a sitcom about Shepherd's life.

Shepherd has branched out to film, with roles in Guess Who, Beauty Shop, Cellular, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa and Academy Award winning film Precious. She still performs stand-up comedy at Los Angeles area clubs like the Comedy Store and the Laugh Factory, although she lives in New York.
She has also been a frequent and popular guest on Ellen DeGeneres's syndicated daytime talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, for which she holds a record for being on the show the greatest number of times. She currently has a recurring role on 30 Rock as Angie Jordan, as well appears as a special guest host of US game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

In 2006, Sherri Shepherd became a frequent guest co-host on ABC's, The View. Shepherd eventually became a permanent co-host on Monday September 10, 2007. Shepherd co-hosted the 35th Daytime Emmy Awards on June 20, 2008. Her fellow co-host was All My Children star Cameron Mathison. Shepherd was nominated for her first Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host.

On May 14, 2009, she was nominated again for her second Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host, when nominations for 36th Daytime Emmy Awards were announced on the Today Show. Shepherd won her first Emmy for Outstanding Talk Show Host that year.

Shepherd was criticized heavily after the September 18, 2007 broadcast of The View, in which she stated that she didn't "believe in evolution. Period." Co-host Whoopi Goldberg asked her, "Is the world flat?" She first responded, "I don't know", and expanded that she "never thought about it." Shepherd continued that it was more important to her that she thought about how she was "going to feed [her] child." Barbara Walters replied by pointing out, "You can do both." However, Shepherd then went on to quote scripture.
Shepherd later referred to her statement as a "brain fart" brought on by nerves, and said that she still is not sure the earth is round.

Similar criticism erupted after the December 4, 2007 broadcast of The View when, during a discussion initiated by Joy Behar about Epicurus, Shepherd attempted to assert that Christians existed in classical Greece, and that the Greeks threw them to the lions. When confronted on this point, she further claimed that "Jesus came first" (before Greeks and Romans) and stated, "I don't think anything predated Christians", to which Joy Behar responded "The Jews".

Shepherd garnered ridicule after admitting to never voting partly due to her upbringing as a strict Jehovah's Witness. She was quoted as saying that she just "never knew the dates or anything"; she stated, "I've never voted for anything in my life." In January 2008, Sherri referred to R&B/gospel singer Shirley Caesar as "the black Patti LaBelle." LaBelle, like Caesar, is black.

Shepherd authored the book: Permission Slips: Every Woman's Guide to Giving Herself a Break, published in October 2009.

In 2001, Shepherd married comedian Jeff Tarpley (also referred to as Jeff T. Aware). Their only child was born in April 2005.Previously, Shepherd had announced that she had expected to have fraternal twins (one boy, one girl), but miscarried her daughter, and instead gave birth three months prematurely.
The couple separated in 2006 and divorced in 2009 after she discovered he was having an affair, an event that inspired her sitcom Sherri.

On January 4, 2011, it was announced that Shepherd got engaged on December 26, 2010, to TV writer Lamar Sally, whom she had been seeing for over a year. On Saturday, August 13, 2011 Shepherd and Sally were wed at at the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago, Illinois.
Shepherd's eight bridesmaids included The View co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Niecy Nash and Community's Yvette Nicole Brown, and Kym Whitley and Shepherd's 6-year-old son Jeffrey Tarpley (from her previous marriage) walked her down the aisle.
A devout Christian, she has stated about the role God has played in her life and career: "If I didn't have God I would have been dead."

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