Lauralee Bell, nominated for a 2016 Daytime Emmy as Outstanding Supporting Actress, always preferred to create her own opportunities rather than have them handed to her. Accordingly, Bell left the cocoon of the show she grew up on, The Young and the Restless, the #1 rated soap, in 2005 to try her luck in other areas. After succeeding, she now works on the show and does other projects at the same time. Bell won the female lead in her first film, Carpool Guy, the lead in the 2006 Lifetime movie, Past Sins, and one of the leads in Easy Rider: The Ride Back. In between, she's raising two very active kids and in her spare time, she's been creating, producing, writing and often acting in several webseries including Family Dinner, Just Off Rodeo and mI promise. She also guested on CSI: Miami, and Castle. Her latest, mI promise, earned Bell an Emmy® Award for Outstanding Special Class-Short Format Daytime Program. She continues a rich family tradition of creating her own projects and winning an Emmy® for her efforts.
In June, 2009, Bell debuted her first Webby Honoree webseries, Family Dinner. Bell wrote, directed, co-starred and with her husband and Anne Clements, produced the series. The first two episodes featured Phyllis Diller, the next two Cloris Leachman, and the fifth episode featured Shirley Jones. All the webisodes made the front page of funnyordie.com, the industry's leading humor website. In 2011, Bell launched her next web series, Telly Award-winner Just Off Rodeo, to merge her fashion sense with entertainment and merchandising. She then debuted mI promise, created to dramatize the results of teen texting and driving, and won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Class-Short Format Daytime Program. mI promise, also a Webby Award Honoree, received a lot of positive feedback. Achievement and success are the norm in the Bell family. Lauralee's late father, William Bell, wrote Days of Our Lives and, with Irna Phillips, developed Another World, and wrote and ran Guiding Light and As the World Turns. With Lauralee's mother, Lee Phillip Bell, he created the hugely successful, The Young and the Restless and the popular daytime drama, The Bold and the Beautiful."
While The Young and the Restless has always been produced and taped in Hollywood since its start, the Bell family continued living in Chicago until 1986. Their roots were there and Lauralee and her two older brothers, Bill Jr., now the president of Bell-Phillip Television and Bradley, now the executive producer of The Bold and the Beautiful, all attended school in the Windy City. Lee Phillip Bell hosted her own television show on the CBS affiliate, WBBM-TV. Lee won fifteen Emmys for the program and became one of the city's most recognized personalities. "My mom got stopped every two seconds," recalls a proud Lauralee, "but it wasn't until I had kids of my own that I realized my mom is Superwoman, she was always there for us and we were unaware of her heavy workload." Her parents, particularly William Sr., commuted regularly between Chicago and Los Angeles. On vacations and holidays, the children were delighted to be able to accompany them, especially Lauralee, who at age nine asked to be allowed to be a non-speaking extra in an episode of The Young and the Restless. At 13, she had a brief scene and a few lines to speak.
Succeeding trips led to what was slowly becoming a recurring role. But now she wasn't asking -- she was being asked to do the show because of something that she had no idea she was creating: positive fan mail. Viewers were charmed by the guileless and natural actress -- someone they'd like their own daughters to be like. They were writing to the network to say that, at last, here was a teenager relatable to their own children, rather than to a slick, older actress playing the part of a teenager.
When the family relocated to LA, Lauralee became a full-time cast member of The Young and the Restless as Christine "Cricket" Blair (Romalotti Williams Blair Williams -- you know those soap marriages never last). Bell's castmates accepted her and the audience embraced her. Bell was voted "Favorite Soap Opera Actress" in 'TEEN magazine's national poll shortly after joining the cast and in 1999, she was nominated by fans and won the Outstanding Supporting Actress Award at the Soap Opera Awards.
Bell lives in Los Angeles. She was the hottest daytime star in France for many years as well as their most frequent TV Guide cover subject. Bell guest-starred on the season finale of Walker, Texas Ranger, hosted television specials for E! Entertainment Television, PAX-TV and a talk show pilot. On October 4, 1997, Lauralee married then-photographer Scott Martin in a storybook wedding in Santa Barbara. The couple had their first child, Christian, in January, 2001 and their second, Samantha, in October, 2002. In 2013, Martin launched 3Labs, Los Angeles' premier event and production facility, located in Culver City.
In 1999, during a three-month break from the show, Lauralee fulfilled a long held dream by opening her own clothing boutique, On Beverly Blvd. In Spring, 2004, Bell relocated and opened the even more successful, On Sunset, which she closed in 2009 to focus on her writing and development projects. The boutique's well-earned reputation derived from Bell's handpicked staff, who acted as a customer's personal stylist. Unsurprisingly, the boutique attracted Hollywood's elite as regular customers.
Bell continues to focus on transforming her ideas into reality when she is not busy acting. And following in her mother's footsteps as Supermom.
