Valerie Bertinelli.

At age 11, after her father Andrew Bertinelli was transferred by General Motors, Valerie moved from Delaware to Michigan, then to California. She attended Clarkston Middle School in Michigan before her family settled in Van Nuys, California. There, she became friends with a TV producer’s daughter and enrolled at the Tami Lynn School of Artists to study acting. Tami Lynn became her personal manager from 1971 to 1979, launching her career in the CBS hit One Day at a Time.

Nancy Carvin and Andrew Francis Bertinelli Jr. welcomed their daughter Valerie Anne on April 23, 1960, in Wilmington, Delaware. She was raised Catholic and is of Italian descent on her father’s side and mostly English and Irish on her mother’s side.

In December 1975, the Norman Lear-produced sitcom One Day at a Time premiered on CBS with Bertinelli as Barbara Cooper, the teenage daughter of a divorced mother. The show ran for nine seasons until 1984. She also appeared in three feature films: C.H.O.M.P.S. 1979, Ordinary Heroes 1986, and Number One with a Bullet 1987. She starred in the miniseries I’ll Take Manhattan 1987 and was the lead in short-lived sitcoms Sydney 1990 and Cafe Americain 1993.

Bertinelli later starred as Melanie Moretti on the comedy series Hot in Cleveland 2010-2015, alongside Jane Leeves, Wendie Malick, and Betty White. The show earned her a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 2011. She also won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Culinary Program and two Golden Globe Awards: one for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and another for Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series/Anthology or Motion Picture Made for Television.

Valerie Bertinelli married rock guitarist Edward Van Halen on April 11, 1981. They had homes in Hollywood Hills and Malibu and welcomed son Wolfgang Van Halen in 1991. The couple separated in 2001 after Van Halen’s tongue cancer diagnosis, and Bertinelli filed for divorce in December 2005, which was finalized two years later. She was at Edward Van Halen’s bedside, along with their son and his second wife Janie Liszewski, when he died of throat cancer in Santa Monica on October 6, 2020.

In 2010, after six years together, Bertinelli became engaged to Tom Vitale; they married in 2011 and divorced in 2022. She remains close friends with her One Day at a Time co-star Glenn Scarpelli and is a cousin of actress Courteney Cox.

For her role as Barbara Cooper on One Day at a Time, Valerie Bertinelli received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Television at 6912 Hollywood Boulevard on August 22, 2012. She won two Golden Globe Awards and a Daytime Emmy Award. Bertinelli also completed the Boston Marathon in 2010 and was inducted into the Hair Fan’s Hall of Fame. Her career has spanned over four decades and includes television comedy and reality cooking shows.