| Danica McKellar | |
|---|---|
| |
| Celebrity Profile | |
| Birth Date | 3 January 1975 |
| Hometown | La Jolla, California |
| Known For | The Wonder Years actress |
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| Partner(s) | Valentin Chmerkovskiy |
| Placement | 6 |
| Highest Score | 29 (Quickstep & Tango) |
| Lowest Score | 24 (Foxtrot, Samba, Jive, & Salsa ) |
| Average Score | 26.3 |
Danica Mae McKellar is a celebrity from Season 18 of Dancing with the Stars.
Early Life[]
Born in La Jolla, California, McKellar moved with her family to Los Angeles when she was eight. Her mother Mahalia was a homemaker; her father Christopher is a real estate developer.
Her mother's ancestry is Portuguese (via the Azores and Madeira islands); her father's ancestry is Scottish, Irish, French, German, and Dutch.
Danica and her sister Crystal McKellar both maintained professional acting careers as children, but with a strong emphasis on education as a priority.
As a result, Crystal became a corporate lawyer, while Danica majored in mathematics. Danica and Crystal also have two half-brothers, Chris Junior and Connor McKellar.
Acting Career[]
Early Career[]
At age seven, McKellar enrolled in weekend acting classes for children at the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles. In her teens, she landed a prominent role in The Wonder Years, an American television comedy-drama that ran for six seasons on ABC, from 1988 to 1993. She played Gwendolyn "Winnie" Cooper, the main love interest of Kevin Arnold (played by Fred Savage) on the show. Her first kiss was with Fred Savage in an episode of The Wonder Years.
She later said, "My first kiss was a pretty nerve-wracking experience! But we never kissed off-screen, and pretty quickly our feelings turned into brother/sister, and stayed that way." Late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon has said that the character of Winnie Cooper "is the coolest girl in any TV show ever."
Later Career[]
McKellar has said that she found it difficult to move from being a child actor to an adult actor." Since leaving The Wonder Years, McKellar has had several guest roles in television series (including one with former co-star Fred Savage in Working), and has written and directed two short films. She appeared in two Lifetime TV movies in the Moment of Truth series, playing Kristin Guthrie in 1994's Cradle of Conspiracy and Annie Mills Carman in 1996's Justice for Annie. She briefly returned to regular television with a recurring role in the 2002–03 season of The West Wing, portraying Elsie Snuffin, the stepsister and assistant of Deputy White House Communications Director Will Bailey.
McKellar appeared in lingerie in the July 2005 edition of Stuff magazine after readers voted her the 1990s star they would most like to see in lingerie. McKellar explained that she agreed to the shoot in part to obtain "grittier roles".
In 2006, McKellar starred in a Lifetime movie and web-based series titled Inspector Mom about a mother who solves mysteries.
On the 1 August 2007, edition of the Don and Mike Show, a WJFK-FM radio program out of Washington, DC, McKellar announced plans that the producers of How I Met Your Mother were planning to bring her back for a recurring role (she guest-starred on the show in late 2005 in "The Pineapple Incident" and again in early 2007 in "Third Wheel"). She also made an appearance in the show The Big Bang Theory, in the episode "The Psychic Vortex".
In 2008, she starred in Heatstroke, a Sci-Fi Channel original movie about searching for alien life on Earth and in 2009 she was one of the stars commenting on the occurrences of the new millennium in VH1's I Love the New Millennium and was the math correspondent for Brink, a program by the Science Channel about technology. In 2013, she played Ellen Plainview in Lifetime's reimagining of the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock film The Wrong Man.
McKellar has also found work as a voice actress. She is the voice of Miss Martian in Young Justice. She has also provided the voices for two characters in three video games: Jubilee in X-Men Legends (2004), and Invisible Woman in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (2006) and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 (2009).
Mathematics[]
McKellar studied at UCLA and earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with honors (summa cum laude) in 1998.
As an undergraduate, she coauthored a scientific paper with Professor Lincoln Chayes and fellow student Brandy Winn entitled "Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models on \mathbb{Z}^2." Their results are termed the 'Chayes–McKellar–Winn theorem'.
Referring to the mathematical abilities of his student coauthors, Chayes was quoted in The New York Times as saying, "I thought that the two were really, really first-rate." McKellar's Erdős number is four and her Erdős–Bacon number is 6.
Personal Life[]
She married composer Mike Verta 22 March 2009, in La Jolla, California; the couple had dated since 2001. They had their first child, a son named Draco, in 2010, McKellar filed for divorce from Verta in June 2012, with the dissolution becoming final in February 2013.
On 16 July 2014, she was engaged to her boyfriend Scott Sveslosky, a partner in the Los Angeles legal firm Sheppard Mullin Richter and Hampton. On 15 November 2014, the two wed in Kauai, Hawaii.
Dancing with the Stars 18[]
On 4 March 2014, she was announced to be joining Season 18 of Dancing with the Stars. She paired with Valentin Chmerkovskiy. McKellar and Chmerkovskiy were eliminated in Week 8, finishing in 6th place.
Scores[]
| Week # | Dance/Song | Judges' Scores | Result | ||
| Inaba | Goodman | Tonioli | |||
| 1 | Foxtrot / "Walk Away" | 8 | 8 | 8 | No elimination |
| 2 | Samba / "All Nite (Don't Stop)" | 8 | 8 | 8 | Safe |
| 3 | Contemporary / "Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)" | 9 | 9/91 | 9 | Safe |
| 42 | Jive / "Love Me Right!" | 8 | 8/83 | 8 | No elimination |
| 5 | Quickstep / "Be Our Guest" | 10 | 9/104 | 10 | Safe |
| 6 | Cha-Cha-Cha / I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)" | 9 | 95/9 | 9 | Safe |
| 7 | Salsa / "Watch Out for This (Bumaye)" Team Freestyle / "Livin' la Vida Loca" |
8 10 |
96/8 106/9 |
8 10 |
Safe |
| 8 | Tango /"Everybody Wants to Rule the World" Celebrity Dance Duel (Samba) /"I Luh Ya Papi" |
10 8 |
9/97 9/87 |
10 9 |
Eliminated |
1 Additional score of Week 3 was given by Robin Roberts.
2 For this week only, as part of the "Partner Switch-Up", Danica McKellar did not perform with Chmerkovskiy and instead performed with Maksim Chmerkovskiy; Chmerkovskiy danced with Meryl Davis.
3 Additional score of Week 4 was given by Julianne Hough.
4 Additional score of Week 5 was given by Donny Osmond.
5 Additional score of Week 6 was given by Redfoo.
6 Additional score of Week 7 was given by Ricky Martin.
7 Additional score of Week 8 was given by Abby Lee Miller.
Performances[]
