Calista Kay Flockhart (born November 11, 1964) is an American actress who is primarily recognized for her work in television. She is best known for playing the title character in the Fox comedy-drama series Ally McBeal for which she won a Golden Globe Award. She starred as Kitty Walker McCallister on the ABC drama, Brothers & Sisters. Flockhart is the wife of actor Harrison Ford.
Flockhart was born in Freeport, Illinois, the daughter of Kay, a teacher of English, and Ronald Flockhart, an executive for Kraft Foods. Her parents are retired and live in Morristown, Tennessee. She has one older brother, Gary. Her mother, Kay Calista, reversed her own first and middle names in naming her Calista Kay. Calista also had a great-grandmother named "Calista".
Because her father's job required the family to move often, Flockhart and her brother grew up in several places including Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Norwich, New York. As a child, she wrote a play called Toyland in which she performed to a small audience at a dinner party.
Ally McBeal is an American legal dramedy series which aired on the Fox network from 1997 to 2002. The series was created by David E. Kelley, who also served as the executive producer, along with Bill D'Elia. The series stars Calista Flockhart in the title role as a young lawyer working in the fictional Boston law firm Cage and Fish, with other young lawyers whose lives and loves were eccentric, humorous and dramatic.
The show placed #48 on Entertainment Weekly's "New TV Classics" list.
The show focused on the romantic and personal lives of the main characters, often using legal proceedings as plot devices to contrast or reinforce a character's drama. For example, bitter divorce litigation of a client might provide a backdrop for Ally's decision to break up with a boyfriend. Legal arguments were also frequently used to explore multiple sides of various social issues.
Cage & Fish (which becomes Cage/Fish & McBeal or Cage, Fish, & Associates towards the end of the series), the fictional law firm where most of the characters work, is depicted as a highly sexualized environment, symbolized by its unisex restroom. Lawyers and secretaries in the firm routinely date, flirt with, or have a romantic history with each other, and frequently run into former or potential romantic interests in the courtroom or on the street outside.
Ally McBeal, a comedy-drama television series created by David E. Kelley, premiered on September 8, 1997 on FOX network in the United States and ended on May 20, 2002. The show spans five seasons of 112 episodes. The episodes were approximately 45 minutes long excluding commercials. FOX decided to cancel the series due to a significant ratings drop in the final season, caused by the introduction of various new characters and the departure of cast members in the previous season.
All seasons of Ally McBeal were released on DVD in the region 2 in 2002 and 2003, respectively. Until fall 2009, only several episodes of the first season of Ally McBeal were available in the United States, due to music rights issues. On October 6, 2009, Fox released a 6-disc set of all 23 season-one episodes, with their original music.
Ally McBeal follows an eccentric lawyer Ally McBeal and her group of friends from work, focusing on their personal and romantic lives, as well as their business cases which would often contrast or reinforce a character's drama. The series starred Calista Flockhart as Ally, Greg Germann as Richard Fish, Jane Krakowski as Elaine Vassal, Peter MacNicol as John Cage, Lisa Nicole Carson as Renée Raddick, Portia de Rossi as Nelle Porter, Lucy Liu as Ling Woo, Gil Bellows as Billy Thomas, Courtney Thorne-Smith as Georgia Thomas, Vonda Shepard as herself, Robert Downey Jr. as Larry Paul, and many others.
Allison Marie "Ally" McBeal is the central fictional character in the Fox series Ally McBeal played by Calista Flockhart.
Ally is a Boston-based lawyer. She is shown as a woman who believes in love and is continually looking for her soul mate. She often hears songs in her head and experiences hallucinations, mostly of a dancing baby, due to her biological clock ticking and of sexual endeavors with various men.
Ally is the daughter of George McBeal (played by James Naughton) and Jeannie McBeal (played by Jill Clayburgh). She claims to have at least one sister and one brother although neither are ever seen (not even in the occasional flashbacks). She used to have a sister who died at the age of five.
Ally attended Harvard Law School with Billy Thomas (played by Gil Bellows), with whom she had had a relationship since they were eight years old. Billy, however, left Harvard to go to University of Michigan Law School, thereby breaking Ally's heart. The next thing we know about Ally is that she lives with district attorney Renee Radick, and she is employed in a Boston law firm.
Songs from Ally McBeal is an album by Vonda Shepard released in 1998 as a soundtrack for the American television series Ally McBeal.
It reached number three in the UK album charts and was a success in the US, Canada and many European countries too. The song "Searchin' My Soul" was used as the Ally McBeal theme tune and was originally featured on one of Vonda Shepard's previous albums, The Radical Light. The majority of the songs, however, are covers of old songs whose lyrics reflected what was happening in Ally's life onscreen.
It peaked #1 in Spain for a month in the summer of 1999, thanks to a big promotion in radios, Vonda Shepard shows in Madrid and Barcelona and the TV series, with the album selling more than 500,000 copies. It is a gold record in Poland.