Courtney Thorne-Smith

Deborah Feingold/Broadway Books

  • Date of birth: November 8, 1967
  • First acting role: Playing Dopey in her kindergarten play of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”
  • Bad timing: Thorne-Smith famously appeared on the cover of InStyle Weddings’ spring 2001 issue, which hit newsstands shortly after she filed for divorce from her first husband
  • Movies to TV: Although she’s best known for her TV, Thorne-Smith’s first major acting roles were in such ’80s movies as “Lucas,” “Summer School” and “Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise”
  • Life imitating art: She used to date her “Melrose Place” costar Andrew Shue, who played her love interest on the show
  • SAG Award: In 1999, Thorne-Smith won a Screen Actors Guild Award for being part of the ensemble cast of “Ally McBeal”
  • Her favorite thing about “According to Jim”: “When my Cheryl character and Dana [played by Kimberly Williams-Paisley] get together against Jim and Andy [played by Larry Joe Campbell] — I love that.”

Life is good for Courtney Thorne-Smith. She got married on January 1 of this year, wrote her first novel (“Outside In”) and is expecting her first child in January 2008. The actress has come a long way since she survived a difficult time in her life at the beginning of this decade. She had quit the TV series “Ally McBeal” due to her public struggles with eating disorders, and she went through a painful breakup with her first husband, genetic scientist Andrew Conrad, whom she divorced in 2001 after less than a year of walking down the aisle.

When LifetimeTV.com talked to Thorne-Smith shortly before her pregnancy was announced, she was bursting with enthusiasm about this new phase in her life as a novelist.

The TV star says that writing her debut novel was intimidating for her at first, but in the end, the book took about nine months to write.

“Outside In” is about a Hollywood actress named Kate Keyes-Morgan, who is on a hit prime-time soap opera but struggles with self-esteem issues about her weight and body image. When Kate’s emotionally abusive husband-manager leaves her for Kate’s self-absorbed diva costar, Sapphire Rose, Kate must pick up the pieces of her life with help from her sassy best friend, Paige, a makeup artist on the show. Meanwhile, Kate befriends a writer named Michael, whom she meets at a local Starbucks, and they become attracted to each other — but he has doesn’t tell Kate that he’s also Sapphire’s agent. (The plot is almost as juicy as an episode of her old show, “Melrose Place”!)

“I know people are going to read it and think it’s autobiographical, but it’s not,” Thorne-Smith says. “I sort of imagined what it would be like to be an actress in her situation without any support. I have a really tight group of girlfriends and I’m really close to my family. And I thought, what if I didn’t have that? What if I were dealing with the isolating element of fame? And that’s what I wrote about: a woman and how, when she finds friendship and support, she opens up.”

More "Outside In"

Thorne-Smith continues, “I always wanted to write a book. If it were autobiographical, it might get messy and complicated, and I wasn’t trying to write the great American novel. So I thought, what if I wrote a book the way I talk? And it really worked out great for me.”

Although her book’s heroine, Kate Keyes-Morgan, isn’t quite like Thorne-Smith, the actress say she does relate to her in some ways. “What I related to the most was that when she found that level of intimacy and friendship, her life opened up. My food issues went away when my life became more important.”

Thorne-Smith says her close-knit group of girlfriends all inspired the Paige character. She laughs she when she says, “Each of them thinks she’s Paige, but they’re all Paige.”

As for the Michael character, who is an agent — as is Thorne-Smith’s husband — the actress concedes there may be some real-life similarities: “I went out to dinner with my editor and she said, ‘I see Michael [in your husband].’ I’m so completely smitten with my husband. He’s not as naive or awkward as Michael, but then again, he’s a lot older than Michael. But in terms of sweetness, they’re definitely similar.”