About Shelley Hack
Shelley Marie Hack (born July 6, 1947) is an American model, actress, producer, and political and media advisor. Hack is best remembered as the face of Revlon's Charlie perfume from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s, and for her role as Tiffany Welles in Season 4 (1979–1980) of the ABC television drama Charlie's Angels, replacing the departing Kate Jackson. She appeared in a total of 26 episodes of the series, before being replaced in Season 5 by model-actress Tanya Roberts.
Hack was born in Greenwich, Connecticut. She graduated from Greenwich Academy, Smith College with a BA in History, and an MBA from NYIT. She began her career as a teen fashion model and became the face of Revlon's Charlie perfume from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s. Life proclaimed her one of the million-dollar faces in the beauty industry who were able to negotiate previously unheard of lucrative and exclusive deals with giant cosmetics companies, were instantly recognizable, and whose names became known to the general public. Shelley ranked among a handful of the 1970s supermodels.
Her feature film debut was a bit part in Woody Allen's award-winning film Annie Hall (1977), as "Street Stranger". In her second film appearance, she was the leading lady in the Joe Brooks romance drama, If Ever I See You Again, but the film was not a success. Shortly thereafter she was cast as Kate Jackson's replacement on the television series Charlie's Angels for one season (1979), playing the character "Tiffany Welles", the role for which she is probably best known. She beat out many competitors for the role, including Michelle Pfeiffer and Barbara Bach.
Following Hack's departure from Charlie's Angels, the actress played a variety of supporting roles. Hack received positive reviews in Martin Scorsese's film The King of Comedy (1983), in which she played a passive-aggressive executive. She starred with Annette O'Toole and Meredith Baxter Birney in the critically acclaimed Vanities (1981), a television production of the comedy-drama stage play about the lives, loves and friendship of three Texas cheerleaders starting from high school to post-college graduation; it aired as a part of Standing Room Only, a series on the premium-television channel HBO. She had a well-received leading role in the cult horror film The Stepfather and was a regular on two short-lived TV series of the 1980s: Cutter to Houston (1983) and Jack and Mike (1986–87). She had several more notable guest appearances in film and television up until 1997.
After Hack retired from acting in the late '90s, she entered politics. Hack became a voting registration and polling station supervisor in the 1997 elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina and produced the first-ever televised presidential debates there as well. She also produced the debates in Sarajevo, Mostar, and the two in Banja Luka. She established herself in a new field as a media consultant for pre- and post-conflict countries. Among her duties was to help spread independent media such as newspapers, radio and television, citing the fact that, with autocratic governments, the population is often fed only State television, which delivers biased content. She also worked for two years with the largest media conglomerate in Eastern Europe where she helped develop and build the infrastructure for the largest state of the art film studio complex in the region. Hack worked in the television sector for ten years, creating ethnically diverse television programs in Eastern Europe. Additionally, she became a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy (PCIP), whose mission is to give a more effective voice to West Coast perspectives on critical global policy issues.
In October 2000, appearing as herself, Hack returned to the Charlie's Angels Townsend Agency office as guest host on A&E Biography, which featured profiles of several Charlie's Angels stars during Hello Angels Week.
In January 2008, Hack made an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The episode, "Classic Americana", featured Hack as Revlon's Charlie perfume model in a 1976 television ad with Bobby Short at the piano. "It was a time when women were changing" Hack stated to Oprah Winfrey. "Women looked at [the ad] and said, 'I want to be like that.'" Referring to the later Revlon commercials and Charlie's Angels, Hack stated "I was lucky. There were two things I was in that were about making women feel a little more empowered".
Hack and her husband, Harry Winer, are company principals for the production company Smash Media ("Entertainment That Brings People Together") that develops and produces content for motion pictures, television and new media.
