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Biography

Courteney Bass Cox was born in Birmingham, Alabama on June 15, 1964. The youngest of four children, Courteney was closest with her father, Richard, who was a contractor (he passed away in 2001). Her parents were divorced in 1974 -- her mother Courteney remarried Hunter Copeland, a businessman, in 1976, while her dad remarried in 1975. Courteney remained in Alabama with her mother and stepfather. Courteney attended Mountain Brook High School and kept busy with activities like tennis, swimming and cheerleading. In 1982, Courteney graduated from high school and began studying architecture at Mount Vernon College in Washington. She dropped out after a year to pursue a modeling career as a Ford model. Her portfolio includes magazine covers like Tiger Beat and Little Miss, as well as commercials for Maybelline, Noxzema and Tampax -- as a matter of fact, she was the first person in American TV history to utter the word "period" on the air. While living in New York in the early '80s, Courteney met Ian Copeland, her stepfather's nephew. The two worked at F.B.I. (Frontier Booking International), a concert booking agency in New York, in 1984. That same year, Courteney gained national exposure when director Brian De Palma selected her from a group of over 300 contenders to star as the girl Bruce Springsteen pulls onstage to dance with him at the end of his "Dancing in the Dark" video.