Birthday: August 14, 1956
Birth Place: Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA

Won an Emmy in 1987 for 227. Married Elgin Charles Williams from December 1, 1996 to present. Grew up in New York City, New York. Started off as an actor after she was bored as a high school history teacher. Height is 5'7. Studied acting at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, NYC. National spokesperson for the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund and supports the United Negro College Fund.

Biography
This sassy TV player has been identified with roles one might term as "floozy", or, at the very least, "of progressive morality", but who also proved her mettle in a number of dramatic or serio-comic parts. Jackee Harry has, at various times in her career, used that stage name, as well as merely "Jackee" (pronounced ja-KAY), and early in her career her birth name, Jacqueline Harry. Harry will always be recalled as Sandra Clark, the flirtatious nemesis to Marla Gibbs in the NBC series, "227". Although Harry had already appeared on TV for several seasons on the NBC daytime drama "Another World", "227", in the parlance of Hollywood, 'made her a star.' Neither a subsequent effort to develop a spin-off series with Harry in the lead nor an attempt to slide her into "Designing Women" were successful. Instead, in 1992, she joined "The Royal Family" (after the death of Redd Foxx) as Ruth, Della Reese's wayward sister. The show still didn't click, and the next year Harry was offered the role of the free-spirited mother of one of the separated-at-birth twins on "Sister, Sister". At first, she rejected the role, but the show's executive producer, Suzanne de Passe, talked her into taking it. "Sister, Sister" ran on ABC for two seasons before being canceled. It was picked up by The WB Network, where it ran twice per week, and was given an order for episodes through the 1997-98 season.

Besides playing on sitcoms, Harry has also appeared in TV longforms, particularly the miniseries "The Women of Brewster Place" (ABC, 1989), in which she was Etta Mae, a woman of loose virtue yet strong character. In the more frivolous mold, she was the driving instructor in "Crash Course" (NBC, 1988). She has also provided animated voices for projects like the "Alvin Goes Back to School" special in 1986.

Harry had been a teacher at a Brooklyn high school before breaking into acting in a small role in a play by Richard Wesley. A trained dancer, she won a role in the chorus of the off-Broadway production of "A Broadway Musical", but when the show was moving to the Great White Way, the director, Gower Champion, plucked Harry from the chorus line and gave her a featured part, telling her she had too much going for her to be in the chorus. Harry then performed in "I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road" for two years at the Public Theatre. More recently, she has frequently performed in "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill," in which she sang the songs of Billie Holiday. Harry's feature work has been limited. She made her debut as a dancer in the "The Cotton Club" (1984) and was Rodney Dangerfield's assistant in "Ladybugs" (1992).

Long before the actress rose to fame playing seductive Sandra Clark in the 1980s sitcom "227," she was a history teacher at Brooklyn Technical High School. And getting her male students to pay attention to her academic lessons instead of her physical attributes was a test she just couldn't pass. "They started whistling at me every day," she recalls with a laugh. "I was trying to teach them how to behave -- it didn't work."

Harry's teaching stint was short-lived (it lasted just two years), but her acting career has had much more longevity. She recently wrapped a two-month run playing the feisty madam of a bordello in the Broadway revival of the musical "The Boys from Syracuse." It was Harry's first time on the Great White Way since making her Broadway debut in 1978's "A Broadway Musical." "Well, I looked fabulous," she says of her recent run in her Mae West-esque voice, adding that she lost 23 lbs. while doing the show. "It was hard work singing and dancing, lifting that leg up, that fan kick. It reminded me of the days when I really used to work for a living."

Harry, 46, has never stopped working, though mainstream audiences haven't seen much of her since 1999, when "Sister, Sister," the sitcom in which she played free-spirited mom Lisa Landry, went off the air. Since then she has been busy getting back to her stage roots, with roles in a 2000 New York City production of the drama "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf" and the musical "Lady Day at the Emerson Bar and Grill," which she performed in Wilmington, Delaware, last winter, playing Billie Holiday. She hopes to bring the show to Broadway.

Seeing her name in lights was always a dream for Harry, who was raised in Harlem. She sang in glee clubs through elementary school, then landed the lead role -- of the King -- in her all-girl school's production of "The King and I" when she was 14. "I took my curtain call and they screamed and cheered and I got hooked," she recalls.

A history major at Long Island University, Harry continued acting and, during her teaching stint, she began winning roles in local productions. "Then I started getting job after job and so I had to quit my teaching gig anyway," she says.

From the stage, Harry leapt to the small screen in the soap opera "Another World" (from 1983-85), and then came her breakout role on "227" (1985-89), for which she won an Emmy. "It was great -- it was the best time of my life, actually," she says of working on the show. "I wouldn't trade it for the world." Other series, including the short-lived "The Royal Family" and "Sister, Sister," followed.

And though Harry often plays voluptuous man-eaters, in real life she's married to hair salon owner Elgin Charles, whom she met at a Halloween masquerade party in 1995. He didn't call her for three weeks, which Harry jokingly attributes to the fact that "I was dressed as Marilyn Monroe, so everything was out. I guess I scared him," she says with a chortle. They married on December 1, 1996, and now live in Sherman Oaks, California.

As for her career, Harry is eager to return to television. "I'm trying like heck -- it ain't easy," she says. "You've gotta come up with a concept and we haven't found one yet." But Harry is hopeful. "It's a lot of irons in the fire," she says. "Hopefully, one of them will catch."