Marg Helgenberger

About Marg Helgenberger

Mary Marg Helgenberger (born November 16, 1958) is an American Emmy winner and Golden Globe-nominated film and television actress. Helgenberger is known for her role as Catherine Willows in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and her role as KC Koloski in China Beach, for which she won her Emmy. She has received other awards including two People's Choice Awards and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

Marg (pronounced with a hard "G," unlike the name Marge) Helgenberger was born in Fremont, Nebraska, the daughter of Kay, a nurse, and Hugh Helgenberger, a meat inspector. She is of Irish and German descent and had a Catholic upbringing. Marg has one older sister named Ann and a younger brother named Curt. One of her first jobs, as a teenager, was spending her summers and her Christmas breaks working as a "boner" at the meat packing plant where her father was employed. Helgenberger played the French horn in her high school (North Bend Central High School) marching band. Until she went to college, Helgenberger wanted to be a nurse like her mother. Marg attended Kearney State College (now the University of Nebraska at Kearney) in Kearney, Neb., then attend Northwestern Alumnus School of Speech in Evanston, Illinois (now the School of Communications) and earned a B.S degree in Speech and Drama.

Originally planning to be a nurse like her mother, Helgenberger got her start as a nightly local news weather girl in her hometown Nebraska (her name was changed by the producer to Margi McCarty) and as a meat boner at the meat packing plant her father was working at during the day. After portraying the role of Blanche Dubois in a university production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” she was bitten by the acting bug.