Faith Ford started her acting career in the early '80s on soap operas, most notably playing Julia Shearer on Another World. She worked more on TV, on shows including Popcorn Kid, Thirtysomething, and Cagney & Lacey. But she really became famous to most Americans when she took on the role of perky news anchor Corky in the CBS sitcom Murphy Brown, which premiered in 1988. Ford ended up with a string of Emmy nominations for the Candice Bergen sitcom and would return to play the character again years later. Read on to find out what else the actor has been doing since the first run of Murphy Brown came to an end in 1998.
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After leaving Corky behind for the first time, Ford went on to plenty of other TV roles. Her first post-Murphy series Maggie Winters only lasted a season, but she had better luck with the sitcoms Norm, starring Saturday Night Live's Norm Macdonald, and Hope & Faith, in which she shared the screen with future talk show host, Kelly Ripa. She's appeared in feature films including The Pacifier and Prom, as well as several TV movies. In 2018, Ford returned to work with her old cast-mates, reprising the role of Corky in the Murphy Brown reboot, which unfortunately was canceled after one season. Her most recent credits include two episodes of the new Peacock comedy, Killing It. She's been married to her husband Campion Murphy for almost 25 years.
Having worked closely with Norm Macdonald on his 1999 t0 2001 sitcom, Ford mourned his passing from cancer in September of last year. She wrote on Instagram, alongside a photo of the two of them on set, "To work with Norm, you had to be on your game. He fed off the live audience like no one I had ever worked with before! When shooting a scene, if he felt the audience wasn't along for the ride, he would get this glint in his eye & flash this little grin and you knew you better be ready!" Ford added that, since she wasn't very practiced at improv, Macdonald would sometimes change up lines just to playfully catch her off-guard, something she "eventually even enjoyed." She concluded her lengthy statement by saying, 'Thank you Norm, for one of the most formative comedy experiences of my career. You made me laugh."
Ford was diagnosed with Graves' disease, which the Mayo Clinic describes as "an immune system disorder that results in the overproduction of thyroid hormones," in the early '90s and continues to advocate for awareness of the disease and for patients living with it. In 2011, she said in an interview that she had felt ill for a long time before her diagnosis but had brushed it off as nerves. It wasn't until she had an episode on the set of Murphy Brown and Bergen advised her to take it seriously and see a doctor that she started the process of identifying the illness.
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In 2020, Ford and Ted McGinley joined their Hope & Faith co-star Kelly Ripa on her daytime talk show, Live with Kelly and Ryan, to reminisce about their times making the sitcom. When Ryan Secrest asked Ford whether she and Ripa ever had a difficult time holding in their laughter during a scene, she answered, "Oh, like, constant. It went on and on. I remember one time I had to hit her in a scene. I don't like to hit people, but it's kind of fun, because it's important to make the right sound when you hit." The show then aired a blooper from the scene she mentioned, where Ford taps Ripa on the forehead and they both break character.
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