Cybill Shepherd was once one of the most famous stars in Hollywood history. It’s not hard to see why: she headlined Moonlighting alongside future movie legend Bruce Willis, and a few years later, she was headlining a sitcom named after herself.
These days, however, you almost have to go out of your way to see Cybill Shepherd’s performances. Moreover, the actor seems to enjoy this: she gets just as much of a kick out of performing for a small room as she does from performing in front of the world.
But how did someone so famous virtually disappear like this? What has she been up to lately, and how has her life changed? Keep reading to discover the truth about Cybill Shepherd!
An affair with Peter Bogdanovich negatively impacted her career
It’s an open secret that when it comes to affairs between men and women, it’s women who usually have their reputations hurt the most. This was certainly the case with Cybill Shepherd’s affair with director Peter Bogdanovich: she was starring in The Last Picture Show while he was director, and both of them intended the affair to last no longer than filming. But the affair continued, leading to Bogdanovich getting a very public and very messy divorce from his wife.
While it takes two to tango in an affair, many in Hollywood saw Shepherd as a bit of a homewrecker because of this. The negative reputation ended up hurting her career: as Bogdonavich himself told Vulture, he was explicitly kept from casting her in his movie Nickelodeon, and he said this was because “There was a kind of mood in the town” regarding Shepherd.
A topsy-turvy life of romance and family
Cybill Shepherd wasn’t lucky in love with Peter Bogdanovich, and she’d continue having a very topsy-turvy love life. She later married David M. Ford and Bruce Oppenheim. Each marriage ended in divorce, but she had a daughter with Ford and twins (a boy and a girl) with Oppenheim.
She continued trying to find love after this, which led to her dating Robert Martin in the 1990s. Sadly, relationships just continued fizzling: she’d later become engaged to the Serbian psychologist Andrei Nikolajevic, but the two of them broke things off before they got married.
The critics often came for Cybill Shepherd
If you listen to Peter Bogdanovich, the primary reason that Cybill Shepherd’s career faced such an uphill climb is because of the fallout from their affair. We don’t doubt such fallout was present, but there is an elephant in the room regarding her reputation: simply put, one person after another who has worked with Shepherd has later claimed she is difficult to work with.
For example, as Nine reports, her Moonlighting costar Curtis Armstrong later wrote that “If anyone ever said no to her, they were gone,” concluding “That’s why she was the way she was.” Later, her Cybill costar Alicia Witt conducted a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) and wrote that “She kinda said some pretty mean things about pretty much everyone she worked with, as I understand.”
As for Cybill executive producer Howard M. Gould, he went beyond simply criticizing the actor. He later wrote a play documenting what it was like to work with her. That play’s title was, of course, Diva.
A feud with Bruce Willis marred her most famous role
While Shepherd already had a history of Hollywood roles, it was arguably the success of the television show Moonlighting that helped make her into a household name. In that series, she starred alongside future movie star Bruce Willis, and their onscreen chemistry helped invent the “will they or won’t they” convention of modern sitcoms. Unfortunately, it sounds like more than sparks were flying when the cameras weren’t rolling.
As Radar Online reports, series costar Curtis Armstrong would later write about the two star actors having a major ongoing feud during the production of the show. This resulted in some pettiness behind the scenes, including Willis and Shepherd getting called to set at the same time because one would allegedly freak out if they had to wait for the other. Sometimes, the feud got physical: Armstrong alleges that in one instance, the two stars were arguing and Shepherd threw a briefcase at Bruce Willis’s head!
Shocked by the cancellation of her television show
Eventually, Cybill Shepherd’s fame reached its peak in the mid-90s, leading to the creation of the sitcom Cybill. The show lasted for four seasons and ended in 1998. Cybill getting abruptly canceled like this shocked fans, but nobody was more shocked than Shepherd herself!
In an interview with Bullz-Eye, Shepherd expressed her frustration, noting “It was ‘to be continued’ at the end of the very last episode!” She clarified that the show ended because of the deal between the network and the studio” and not because of “the quality or anything. It was just over a deal.” Later, however, she would allege the real reason it was canceled was because she refused the advances of producer Les Moonves, who would later resign from CBS in 2018 after a flurry of allegations regarding sexual assault and harassment.
In subsequent years, Cybill Shepherd has had some prominent roles in hit shows such as The L Word and The Client List, and she has appeared in ambitious films such as Being Rose. When she isn’t acting onscreen or chilling at home between roles, she likes to perform for fans at intimate locations such as Studio City’s 125-person-capacity venue Vitello’s.