Born on February 22, 1968 in Munich, West Germany, Jeri Ryan is an actress best known for a variety of role she assumed in movies and television including her most notable on Star Trek: Voyager. Ryan is the daughter of a U.S. Army master sergeant and a social worker. She grew up on army bases in Kansas, Maryland, Hawaii, Georgia, and Texas. After her father retired, the family finally settled in Kentucky. She eventually attended Northwestern University after graduating from high school as a National Merit Scholar in 1986. She became Miss Illinois in 1989 and went on to bag third runner-up in the 1990 Miss America Pageant. After college, she immediately upped and moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting professionally
Jeri Ryan made her acting debut in Who's the Boss? and followed that with guest-starring roles in TV shows like Melrose Place, Matlock, and The Sentinel as well as TV movies such as Co-Ed Call Girl. Her big break came when she won a regular role as an extraterrestrial investigator named Juliet Stuart on the TV show Dark Skies. The show was cancelled after one season, but her performance had drawn the attention of the science-fiction community.
In 1997, Ryan was cast to play Seven of Nine, a Borg drone freed from the collective on the science fiction series Star Trek: Voyager. The role drew her instant fame and her wardrobe made her a sex symbol among some science-fiction fans. It also drew criticism from some fans who felt that character was created to add sexuality to the show, and who felt that a disproportionate number of episodes focused on her character to the exclusion of others. Ryan has recently appeared in movies such as Down With Love, The Kid and Dracula 2000. She also had a recurring role on The OC in the fall of 2005 and guest-starred on David E. Kelley's Boston Legal in 2006. In the same year, she bagged the role of Los Angeles District Attorney Jessica Devlin on the CBS legal drama Shark. Other credits of hers include an appearance on Two and a Half Men, and TV films like The Commuters and Sudbury.
-There are three things pageant women do. There's the Vaseline thing, which I didn't do. There's duct-taping your boobs, which I never did because I'm not into pain. The third thing is using athletic spray adhesive on your butt to keep your swimsuit in place. I did do that. So one out of three ain't bad.