Danica McKellar

Education Advocate

Milo Murphy's Law

The Wonder Years

**Danica Mae McKellar** (born January 3, 1975[1]) is an American actress, mathematics writer, and education advocate. She played Kevin Arnold's on-off girlfriend Winnie Cooper in the television series *The Wonder Years*.

From 2010–2013 and since 2018, McKellar voiced Miss Martian in the animated superhero series *Young Justice*. In 2015, McKellar was cast in the Netflix original series *Project Mc2*. She also appears in several television films for Hallmark Channel. She is also the current voice of Judy Jetson from The Jetsons since 2017 due to Janet Waldo's death in 2016.
In addition to her acting work, McKellar later wrote six
non-fiction books, all dealing with mathematics (as she has a bachelor's
 degree in math from UCLA): *Math Doesn't Suck*, *Kiss My Math*, *Hot X: Algebra Exposed*, *Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape*, which encourage middle-school and high-school girls to have confidence and succeed in mathematics, *Goodnight, Numbers*, and *Do Not Open This Math Book*

## Early Life

McKellar was born in La Jolla, California.[1] She moved with her family to Los Angeles when she was eight. Her mother Mahaila (nee Tello) was a homemaker; her father Christopher is a real estate developer.[5] She is of paternal Scottish, French, German, Spanish, Dutch descent and her mother is of Portuguese origin via the Azores and Madeira islands.[6]
McKellar studied at the University of California, Los Angeles where she earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree *summa cum laude* in Mathematics in 1998.[7] As an undergraduate, she coauthored a scientific paper with Professor Lincoln Chayes and fellow student Brandy Winn titled "Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin–Teller models on ."[8] Their results are termed the "Chayes–McKellar–Winn theorem".[9][10] Later, when Chayes was asked to comment about the mathematical abilities of his student coauthors, he was quoted in *The New York Times*, "I thought that the two were really, really first-rate."[11] For her past collaborative work on research papers, McKellar is currently assigned the Erdős number four, and her Erdős–Bacon number is six.

## Acting Career

### *The Wonder Years* and early acting career

At age seven, McKellar enrolled in weekend acting classes for children at the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles.[13] In her teens, she landed a prominent role in *The Wonder Years*, an American television comedy-drama that ran for six seasons on ABC, from 1988 to 1993. She played Gwendolyn "Winnie" Cooper, the main love interest of Kevin Arnold (played by Fred Savage) on the show. Her first kiss was with Fred Savage in an episode of *The Wonder Years*.[14]

She later said, "My first kiss was a pretty nerve-wracking
experience! But we never kissed off screen, and pretty quickly our
feelings turned into brother/sister, and stayed that way."[15] Late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon has said that the character of Winnie Cooper "is the coolest girl in any TV show ever."[16]

### Later acting and music

McKellar has said that she found it "difficult" to move from being a child actress to an adult actress.[15] Since leaving *The Wonder Years*, McKellar has had several guest roles in television series (including one with former co-star Fred Savage on *Working*), and has written and directed two short films. She appeared in two Lifetime TV movies in the *Moment of Truth* series, playing Kristin Guthrie in 1994's *Cradle of Conspiracy* and Annie Mills Carman in 1996's *Justice for Annie*. She briefly returned to regular television with a recurring role in the 2002–03 season of *The West Wing,* portraying Elsie Snuffin, the stepsister and assistant of Deputy White House Communications Director Will Bailey.

McKellar was featured in Debbie Gibson's eighth single from the *Electric Youth* album, "No More Rhyme", which was released in 1989. She plays the cello in the beginning of the video.[17]

McKellar appeared in lingerie in the July 2005 edition of *Stuff* magazine[18]
 after readers voted her the 1990s star they would most like to see in
lingerie. McKellar explained that she agreed to the shoot in part to
obtain "grittier roles".[15]

In 2006, McKellar starred in a Lifetime movie and web-based series titled *Inspector Mom* about a mother who solves mysteries.[19][20]

On the August 1, 2007, edition of the *Don and Mike Show*, a WJFK-FM radio program out of Washington, D.C., McKellar announced plans that the producers of *How I Met Your Mother*
 were planning to bring her back for a recurring role (she guest-starred
 on the show in late 2005 in "The Pineapple Incident" and again in early
 2007 in "Third Wheel"). She also made an appearance on the show *The Big Bang Theory*, in the episode "The Psychic Vortex".[21]

In 2008, she starred in *Heatstroke*, a Sci-Fi Channel
 original movie about searching for alien life on Earth and in 2009 she
was one of the stars commenting on the occurrences of the new millennium
 in VH1's *I Love the New Millennium* and was the math correspondent for *Brink*, a program by the Science Channel about technology. In 2013, she played Ellen Plainview in Lifetime's reimagining of the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock film *The Wrong Man.*

McKellar has also worked as a voice actress, having provided the voice of Jubilee in the video game *X-Men Legends* (2004), and Invisible Woman in *Marvel: Ultimate Alliance* (2006) and *Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2* (2009). She provided the voice of Miss Martian in the TV series *Young Justice*.

In 2012, she starred in the Lifetime movie *Love at the Christmas Table* with Dustin Milligan.

In January 2013, she starred in the Syfy movie *Tasmanian Devils* with Apolo Ohno.

On August 20, 2013, Canadian singer Avril Lavigne released the music video for her single "Rock N Roll" from her upcoming self-titled fifth album, which features McKellar as "Winnie Cooper".[22]

On March 4, 2014, she was announced to be joining season 18 of *Dancing with the Stars*. She paired with Valentin Chmerkovskiy.[23] McKellar and Chmerkovskiy were eliminated on Week 8, finishing in 6th place.

She had a guest appearance in the *Impractical Jokers* season four episode six titled "The Blunder Years".

In 2015, she starred in the Netflix original series *Project Mc2* as The Quail.

She has starred in several Hallmark Channel movies, including *Crown for Christmas*, *My Christmas Dream*, and *Campfire Kiss*.