page_title: Mayim Bialik
section_title: Acting career
hierarchical_section_title: Mayim Bialik / Acting career
caption_attribution_description: Actress Mayim Bialik at the 36th Annual Gracie Awards Gala
context_page_description: Mayim Chaya Bialik is an American actress, neuroscientist, and author. From 1991 to 1995, she played the title character of the NBC sitcom Blossom. She later played neurobiologist Amy Farrah Fowler on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory from 2010 to 2019. Outside of her acting career, she holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience. For her role as Fowler, Bialik has been nominated four times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2015 and 2016.
context_section_description: Bialik started her career as a child actress in the late 1980s. Her early roles included the horror film Pumpkinhead (1988), her first acting job, and guest appearances on The Facts of Life (final-season episode only) and Beauty and the Beast. In 1988–1989, she had a recurring role on the TV comedy Webster playing Frieda, Webster's classmate, in eight episodes. It was for her Beauty and the Beast work, in which she played a sewer-dwelling girl named Ellie who had about 10 lines of dialogue, that Bialik obtained her Screen Actors Guild (SAG) card. She appeared in three episodes of MacGyver as Lisa Woodman. She appeared in Beaches (1988), playing Bette Midler's character as a young girl. Multiple contemporary reviews singled out her performance as a strong point in an otherwise emotionally contrived and formulaic film. She appeared in the video for the song "Liberian Girl" by Michael Jackson. In 1990, she was tied to two television pilots, Fox's Molloy and NBC's Blossom. Molloy at first produced six episodes for a tryout run, followed by the shooting of the pilot special for Blossom. The latter actually aired two weeks before Bialik's Fox series and ultimately garnered higher ratings than the former. When Molloy folded after its six episodes, Blossom premiered as a mid-season replacement on January 3, 1991, and aired until May 22, 1995.
  On September 8, 1992, Bialik was a celebrity contestant guest in the episode "Disturbing The Heavenly Peace", the first episode of the second season of the game show Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?. She had a major part in the Woody Allen comedy film Don't Drink the Water in 1994. Between 1995 and 2005, she mostly did voice-over work for cartoons, such as The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, Disney's Recess and Kim Possible, Cartoon Network's Johnny Bravo, and Nickelodeon's Hey Arnold!. She appeared in the feature film Kalamazoo? (2005) and appeared in three episodes of the HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm as Jodi Funkhouser, the lesbian daughter of a friend of Larry David. She also made guest appearances as a fictionalized version of herself in the series Fat Actress and made a guest appearance in an episode of Saving Grace.
  Bialik had a recurring role as the high school guidance counselor in ABC Family's The Secret Life of the American Teenager. In 2009, she was nominated by Clinton Kelly for a makeover on TLC's What Not To Wear. She joined the cast of The Big Bang Theory as Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler in September 2010. Her first appearance was in the season 3 finale as a potential love interest for the character of Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons). In season 4, she began as a recurring character playing Sheldon's "friend that's a girl, but not a girlfriend." Beginning with the 8th episode of season 4, she became part of the main cast. The character Amy is a neurobiologist, which is related to Bialik's real-life doctorate in neuroscience. Bialik's performance in The Big Bang Theory earned her Emmy Award nominations in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. Bialik was one of seven actresses who had a "quirky" personality to audition for the role. Prior to her joining the cast, in the episode "The Bat Jar Conjecture", Raj suggests recruiting the real-life Bialik to their Physics Bowl team, saying "You know who's apparently very smart is the girl who played TV's Blossom. She got a Ph.D. in neuroscience or something." She is cast as one of the guest stars on the Steve Carell 2014 improvisational sketch show Riot.
  In August 2014, Bialik began hosting a revival of Candid Camera on TV Land alongside Peter Funt. On March 6, 2012, her book, Beyond the Sling: A Real-Life Guide to Raising Confident, Loving Children the Attachment Parenting Way, was released. Her most recent movie appearance was in a Lifetime Christmas movie, The Flight Before Christmas in 2015.
  In 2019 Bialik appeared in a commercial for IBM. On August 20, 2019, it was announced that she and her new production company, Sad Clown Productions, had signed exclusive contracts with Warner Bro
caption: Bialik at the 36th Annual Gracie Awards in 2011
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