Ted Danson & Mary Steenburgen

Hosted by Todd Oppenheimer
Benefiting Seacology

Mary Steenburgen left her native Arkansas at the age of seventeen to pursue a career in acting and as her first film role landed the lead opposite Jack Nicholson in Goin' South. Though Steenburgen has a reputation for playing gentle, almost fragile women in such films as Time After Time, Back To The Future III, and The Butcher's Wife, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1980 for a very brash and offbeat performance in Melvin and Howard. Her roles, in fact, have been both nuanced and varied from a flagrantly vulnerable and adulterous turn in What's Eating Gilbert Grape to a steely hard-hearted performance in Philadelphia. No stranger to activism, Steenburgen took a break from her acting career to campaign for close friend and fellow Arkansas-native, Bill Clinton and has been an impassioned advocate for her husband, Ted Danson's environmental organization, Oceana.

After acting in college and on the stage in New York, actor Ted Danson gained nation-wide notoriety with his twelve-year stint as the wise-cracking bartender, Sam Malone, on Cheers. Danson won two Emmys and two Golden Globes for this performance and following his success on Cheers went on to star in the successful sitcom Becker, to hilariously lampoon himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm and, in 2007, to break away from his reputation as comedic leading man with a dark and menacing turn in the TV drama Damages. Danson's film career has run a similar gamut from the classic comedy Three Men and A Baby to the gritty war film Saving Private Ryan. In addition to his acting, Danson has avidly pursued his desire to protect and defend the environment. In 1987, he co-founded the American Oceans Campaign, now called Oceana, which has played an essential role in the passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act, was instrumental in protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling and has become a leader in ocean advocacy.