In my opinion, one of the smartest, funniest sitcoms ever produced is Curb Your Enthusiasm. The relationship between Cheryl Hines and Larry David is one of the things that makes Curb so fantastic.
These two have as much chemistry and affectionate tension as any midnight cop or lawyer show. They also have some sharp one-liners for one another.
Before finding fame on television, Cheryl spent years working her way up the acting ranks, but lately, the spotlight has been on her marriage to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and her encounter with Fidel Castro.
Cheryl’s most well-known role now is arguably that of Larry David’s patient wife in the HBO television series Curb Your Enthusiasm.
As a Hollywood celebrity, Cheryl has amassed a respectable sum of money, and because to her marriage to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., she also belongs to a family that has been dubbed “American royalty.”
However, Cheryl really did have to fight for her position in the entertainment business.
She was reared a Catholic and grew up in Tallahassee. She was born September 21, 1965, in Miami Beach, Florida. Even though the family didn’t have much money, Cheryl, her sister, and her two brothers were expected to go to college and succeed.
Cheryl fell in love with performing when she was young, and she participated in the Young Actors Theatre throughout high school. Cheryl later admitted that her father James Hines was largely responsible for her sense of humor.
“He was definitely my first exposure to comedy, and what it meant to be funny. He was quick-witted with his own set of phrases and made us laugh until the end,” Cheryl said after her father’s passing in 2015.
“Get a boob job”
After graduating from the University of Central Florida, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. But it wasn’t easy for the ambitious, young actress from Tallahassee. Before her break in Hollywood, she made a living as a waitress, television reporter, and telephone operator.
She also served as Rob Reiner’s personal assistant for a brief time.
She worked as an unpaid intern in Los Angeles, trying to establish a name for herself. She spent her days looking through headshots.
Cheryl had the chance to observe the cynicism of Hollywood at that time firsthand. She even received advice from one female manager to “have a breast job” if she wanted to excel in the field.
“At that time, I hadn’t even thought about it — and it did not seem like it was necessary,” she said. “I went home and started thinking about all the actresses that I really admired and whether breast size had anything to do with it. Like: ‘Goldie Hawn doesn’t have big ones,’” Cheryl told Yahoo.
Cheryl finally decided against having surgery since she wasn’t “dying to be on Baywatch.”
After Cheryl started performing improvised humor and sketches at The Groundlings Theater, her career really started to take off.
The Groundlings comedy group’s Pheobe, played by Friends star Lisa Kudrow, also served as Cheryl’s first instructor. Cheryl gained a lot of improv and comedy sketch writing skills at The Groundlings, a fantastic school.
Cheryl had only performed extremely minor roles and cameos on the television series Swamp Thing and Unsolved Mysteries before to Curb Your Enthusiasm.
To say that Cheryl was completely unknown in Hollywood before Larry David arrived is not an understatement. His wife would be portrayed by a “unknown actress” in the television show.
Her life was revolutionized when she was cast as “Cheryl” in the well-known sitcom, although in 2000, Cheryl was unaware of Larry.
”I said well how old is that guy? Isn’t he … old?” she recalled before meeting Larry, now 75.
The audition was a complete fiasco as well. The casting director gave Cheryl an odd heads-up before she entered.
”Don’t touch Larry. He doesn’t like for people to touch him,” the casting director explained, went on to explain how the show was supposed to feel like a documentary: “So if at any point it feels fake … the audition will be over.’ And … here’s Larry.”
Fortunately, Cheryl performed admirably. Nobody could be unhappy with Larry’s selection because the “unkown actress” completely nailed her part in the production.
The majority of the dialogue in Curb Your Enthusiasm is improvised. Although there is a general outline or loose script, each actor in the show must improvise to come up with the dialogue on the spot.
It wasn’t until I starting watching the episodes (quite lately) that I realized Cheryl was acting; it’s simple to mistakenly believe that she is Larry’s wife in real life.
Indeed, it seems I wasn’t the only one who was left a little confused.
”When the show first came out people from Tallahassee thought, ‘Well, maybe Cheryl got married’,” Cheryl recalled.
Despite appearing in more than 100 episodes of the show, Cheryl is regretfully no longer dating Larry. In season 8, Her Character breaks up with Larry. She then started dating Ted Danson, a friend of Larry’s.
HBO decided to continue the show for a 12th season in August 2022.
During her time on Curb, Cheryl, who was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2014, worked on various initiatives. She has acted alongside the late Robin Williams in a number of movies, including the road comedy RV.
In her first major motion picture, RV, Cheryl plays a less-than-happy mother who must suffer a family vacation while confined to a disorganized camper.
”I don’t think my friends believed me when I was going to be co-starring with Robin Williams. Then they saw the previews and said, ’Oh my gosh, your’e in the whole thing,” Cheryl told The Tallahassee Democrat in 2006.
Cheryl, like numerous other witnesses, was astounded by Williams’s goodness and compassion. He included Cheryl and all the other performers on the set, despite the fact that he was the movie’s main character.
”Robin was so nice. As soon as I met him he hugged me and said he was a fan of men from ”Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Cheryl said.
Naturally, Robin Williams is not the only mega-celebrity that Cheryl has encountered during her life. According to herself, she is a friend of the famous writer Nick Hornby, and Barbra Streisand has played Running Charades at her house.
Cheryl is also a poker enthusiast, and has won $50,000 over the years. She even once had lemonade with Fidel Castro at his home in Cuba?
”This was probably 10 years ago,” Cheryl shared during an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2022.
”And while we where there, my husband wanted to see if we could visit Mr. Castro. And then when we got to the hotel, there was a guy in a white linen suit with a hat that said ’El Presidente will see you’ and they came and picked us up in a van,” Cheryl explained.
Cheryl’s first marriage was to the producer and manager Paul Young. The couple tied the knot in 2002 and welcomed a daughter, Catherine Rose Young, in 2004.
But after seven years of marriage, Cheryl and Paul decided to pull the plug and file for divorce. According to Cheryl, they remain close friends and have been working work together on set since the break-up.
“Larry David was my first husband because when I started doing ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ I was single and had never been married before,” she joked in an interview with Fox News.
“Then I married Paul Young, and then I married Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”
One year after her first divorce, Cheryl started dating the environmental lawyer and author Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Cheryl’s husband is the son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
“We share the same values. Family first. We like to have a good time and work hard,” Cheryl said when they met.
It was thanks to Larry David, her on-off TV husband, that Cheryl and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became a couple.
”He introduced us — just because we were at the same event,” Hines said in a podcast and continued:
”But then later Larry was like, ‘That’s a terrible idea. No, no, no — don’t get involved.’ Cut to we’ve been married for eight years”.
The Curb Your Enthusiasm actress married Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2014. The ceremony was held at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod in front of 300 guests, including Larry David and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
Ever since they met and fell in love, Cheryl has explained how her world changed for the better. She’s been overwhelmed to see how many people Kennedy and his famous family have impacted.
“Someone will come up to Bobby basically in tears and say, ‘What you and your family have done for our country and human rights and democracy has been so important to me and my family,’” Cheryl shared.
But lately, her husband has been under fire after some very controversial statements during a rally against vaccine mandates.
Cheryl called her husband’s remark” reprehensible and insensitive” at the time, and later she talked about how they should learn from each other.
”I think I’ve taught him to I don’t want to say lighten up because he’s” more “funny and playful” than his public persona suggests”, she told Yahoo and continued:
”Hopefully I’m teaching him to check it at the door. Like don’t bring everything home. He’s invested in so many heavy causes that it’s like: ‘Oh man.’ Sometimes you just need to watch 30 Rock and get your mind off things.”
Dallas Royce photo
In 2011, Cheryl Hines signed on for a role in the ABC sitcom Suburgatory. As a praised and well-renowned actress, she was a great addition to the cast, but the show only ran for three seasons.
Cheryl starred as Dallas Royce, a ”110% upper middle-class suburban mother” with tanning solution, fake nails, tight clothing, dead hair, silicone rubber, and Red Bull.
With her disarming smile, Cheryl is regarded as one of the sweetest actors in Hollywood. However, we don’t know if she’s undergone plastic surgery like Botox, a facelift, a nose job, breast implants, or cheek fillers.
But for her role in Suburgatory, we certainly got a taste of how she could have looked like. In one of the episodes, Dallas Royce decides to get too much botox to comedic effect. So the actress wears a silicone forehead, cheeks, and lips – and she looks kind of scary, right?
Fortunately, she could go back to her normal self after the recordings.
Cheryl currently occupies a permanent spot on the I Can See Your Voice panel. We’ll probably continue to see her on our televisions for years to come, regardless of what she comes up with next.
