Jeri Ryan Speaker & Booking Information

Ryan was born as Jeri Lynn Zimmerman in Munich, Germany to American parents. She has one older brother, Mark. Her father was in the United States Army and raised the family on military bases all over the country located in Kansas, Maryland, Georgia, and Texas. When Ryan was eleven, her family settled in Paducah, Kentucky. After Ryan graduated high school in 1986 as a National Merit Scholar, she attended Northwestern University, where she was a member of the Alpha Phi fraternity. In 1989, Ryan became Miss Illinois and was a preliminary swimsuit winner at the Miss America Pageant. Jeri finished 3rd Runner Up to Miss America 1990, Debbye Turner. (The 1st Runner Up, Virginia Cha, is now seen regularly on CNN Headline News.) Ryan graduated from Northwestern with a BA in Theatre in 1990. She stands 5 ft 8 in (1.73 m) in height.

Ryan was hired as an extra in Planes, Trains & Automobiles during the summer prior to her freshman year at Northwestern, but was cut out of the final version. After college, she pursued acting full time in Los Angeles. She 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 like 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 the role drew 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 that followed her addition to the cast focused on her character to the exclusion of others. However, her appearance also coincided with higher ratings and more positive critical reviews of Voyager, which were partly attributed to better screenwriting and partly due to her character being both intrinsically interesting and well-acted. Seven of Nine appeared on seven TV Guide covers in the USA.

After Voyager ended in 2001, Ryan joined the cast of Boston Public in the role of Ronnie Cooke, a frustrated lawyer who quits to become a high school teacher. The show's producer, David E. Kelley, wrote the role specifically for her. The show was cancelled in 2004.

Ryan has recently appeared in movies such as Down With Love. She had a recurring role on The OC in the fall of 2005 and guest-starred on David E. Kelley's Boston Legal in 2006.

Ryan will star in the new CBS legal drama Shark. Ryan will play Jessica Devlin, the Los Angeles District Attorney, Shark also stars James Woods, and the pilot was directed by Spike Lee.

In 1990, while dealing blackjack at a charity event, Ryan met investment banker and future political candidate Jack Ryan. The couple married in 1991 and had a son, Alex, in 1994. Throughout their marriage, Ryan and her husband took turns commuting between Los Angeles and Chicago for their careers, but finally divorced in 1999. Ryan had mentioned in an interview for Star Trek that the frequent separation between Chicago and Los Angeles had been difficult for their marriage. The reasons behind their divorce were kept sealed at their mutual request.

Five years later, when Jack Ryan's Senate campaign began, the Chicago Tribune newspaper and WLS-TV, the local ABC affiliate, sought to have the records released. Both Jeri and her husband agreed to make their divorce records public; but not the custody records, claiming that they could be harmful to their son if released.

On June 22, 2004, the California judge in the case agreed to release the custody files. The decision generated much controversy because it went against both parents' direct request and because it generally reversed the early decision to seal the papers in the best interest of the child. It was revealed that, six years before, Jeri had accused Jack Ryan of asking her to perform sexual acts with him in public, and in adult clubs in New York, New Orleans, and Paris. Jeri Ryan described one as "a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling." This information led Jack Ryan to withdraw his Republican candidacy for an open United States Senate seat in Illinois.

Jeri Ryan has long admitted to a love of food, and while starring in Boston Public, she moonlighted on weekends in the kitchen of the Los Angeles restaurant The House. In February of 2005, she opened - in partnership with her boyfriend, Chef Christophe Emé - the restaurant Ortolan. Located on Third Street in Los Angeles, California, the restaurant serves French food with a modern interpretation. The restaurant has received many accolades, including being named one of the best new restaurants of the year by Esquire magazine and msn.com.