We've known her as the sweetheart of 90210 since we were teens. But to her three daughters, Jennie Garth is picnic packer, baker-in-chief, and favorite playmate—who just happens to be making another star turn on a show they can't watch.
jennie Garth likes to be lazy. She describes herself as a "homebody" who lucked into her 20-year acting career, calling it a "right place, right time" kind of thing. And when she reads a profile of a fellow celebrity mom, she feels largely inadequate: "I think, This lady has all of this time to do amazing stuff. She has this amazing marriage.Everything in her life sounds perfect. My life is not like that." For starters, her memory is shot. "It's almost like I have some kind of disorder—I don't remember the good things ... or the bad," she laughs.
And if the 37-year-old mother of three—Luca, 12; Lola, 6; and Fiona, 3—has a moment to herself, she spends it scrubbing. "I really enjoy taking something, digging in, and cleaning it," she says. "It's weird, but it gives me sanity." Given all this information, it's possible to come to only one conclusion: Jennie Garth is awesome.
You've got to hand it to her. Her insistence that she's as average-slash-nuts as the rest of us is impressive, even if it's not entirely believable. But a mom who's this comfortable admitting her flaws—who's also famous?
That's as rare as a rainy day in Beverly Hills.
Of course, that's where Garth first made her mark as Kelly Taylor, the sweetheart of the zip code on Fox's '90s hit teen drama Beverly Hills 90210. Fans of the show (yes, you) may remember that Kelly didn't start out so lovable. At first her character was shallow, fashion-obsessed, and a bit mean. Only someone as inherently likable as Garth, who grew up riding horses and a banana-seat bike around in the "middle of nowhere" in rural Illinois, could have made anyone care about a spoiled blonde in L.A.
Now, after a 10-year turn on the original show, a stint on the WB sitcom What I Like About You, a string of TV movies (many of which she produced), and an impressive fourth-place showing on Dancing with the Stars (she competed when Fiona was still an infant), she's reprising the role that made her famous. On the CW's 90210 sequel, Kelly Taylor is now a guidance counselor at her high school alma mater. There's a new crew of actors on the spinoff, all hot young things struggling with the too-thin-too-famous-too-soon trials of stardom.
The under-30 set may not see it this way, but by comparison, Garth appears all the more serene and appealing.
"I had my share of screwups, but they weren't memorialized for all to see," she says. "I got off lucky. I see the girls on the show now, and I think, Enjoy it while you can, because this time is very fleeting. I had maybe three years to be free, completely oblivious, and self-indulgent. Then I had a child really young and a lot of responsibility."
Twelve years ago, when Garth, then 25, had Luca (with her then-boyfriend, actor Peter Facinelli, who is now her husband), no breathless "bump watchers" tracked the reproductive lives of young Hollywood, and there were no star-baby bloggers to gurgle and coo. The only people paying attention had a different agenda.
