Debra Jo Rupp

Debra Jo Rupp is currently single and divides her time between Los Angeles and Lee, Massachusetts

Debra Jo Rupp was born on 24 February 1951 in Glendale, California but was brought up in Boxford, Massachusetts as a Southern Baptist along with her two sisters by her conservative parents.

She attended the ‘Masconomet Regional High School’ in Boxford, from where she graduated in 1969. Though Debra wanted to study acting, her parents were completely opposed to the idea. Consequently, she was sent to New York to attend the University of Rochester, New York because at that time, the institution did not offer any theater instruction.

Luckily, in her freshman year, the university added a dramatics department. She took classes in acting and an active part in on-campus dramatic activities as a member of Drama House, a modest theater club cum venue.

Debra passed out in 1974 with a B.A. degree and immediately moved to New York to kick off her acting career as advised by her teachers.

Arriving in New York City, Debra Jo Rupp busied herself with stage performances and also appeared in a number of commercials.

In 1980, she played the character of Helen, a cheating husband’s wife in ‘Second Verse’, a one-act comedy by Sharon Tipsword in a Nat Horne Theater drama festival.

It took her six years to land her first role on television; in 1980, she played the role of a topless dancer, Shelia, in ‘All My Children’, a daytime drama.

Debra played the part of a young bride in ‘The Middle Ages’, produced by A. R. Gurney in 1985 at the Olympia Dukakis-founded Whole Theater Company in Montclair, New Jersey.

Her performance as an unloved young wife in Arthur Laurents’, ‘The Time of the Cuckoo’, received a very good review from Walter Goodman of the New York Times.

‘A Girl's Guide to Chaos’: Rupp’s first big hit that also won her critical acclaim and opened up her future in both Broadway and Hollywood.

‘That '70s Show’, gave her popular recognition and commercial success

Friends’; made Debra a household name