Named as one of the “20 Best School Shows of All Time” by AOL TV, “Saved by the Bell” featured high school students at the fictional Bayside High School in southern California.
The original NBC pilot was called “Good Morning, Miss Bliss,” but it never got off the ground with the network. The Disney Channel ran 13 episodes before canceling the series, which was then rescued by NBC. Executive producer Peter Engel wanted to call the show “When the Bell Rings,” but was convinced by network executives to change the name to “Saved by the Bell.”
Tiffani replaced Shannen Doherty on “90210” in 1994. The show's highest rating came in the Season 5 opener when Tiffani debuted as Valerie.
“At first, I did all my interviews and it was always, 'How do you feel about replacing Shannen?' It was hard. I wasn't replacing anybody,” Tiffani said.
“We wanted a baaad girl,” said Charles Rosin, a former executive produer of the show in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “There was really an edge with Tiffani because she was so sexual. In her first episode she smoked some pot. We were making a statement."
Airing from 1990-2000, “90210” resonated with its audience.
Classic TV Beauties 1990s Countdown
TIFFANI THIESSEN as Kelly Kapowski in "Saved by the Bell" and Valerie Malone in "Beverly Hills 90210"
Tiffani began her TV career playing the goody-goody Kelly and ended the 1990s as the bad girl Valerie.
Tiffani's Kelly was the All-American teen-ager on “Saved by the Bell,” the most popular girl in school, the squeaky clean honor roll student who was also the head cheerleader and an excellent athlete.
She joined “90210” for the fifth season, playing the troubled and naughty Valerie, a young woman who was more wicked and degenerate than she originally appeared when she moved to Beverly Hills.
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“Once Jennie (Garth) and I went to Vegas, and this girl who'd been drinking a heapload of alcohol attacked us and said we had the worst show and she hated us,” Tiffani said. “We said, 'You must be watching it because you know who we are.'
"She actually apologized: 'Yeah, I do love you, I'm sorry!' She was just embarrassed that she actually watched the show for so many years.
“Sometimes it's crazy to think about how long 'Saved By The Bell' and '90210' ran for so long internationally,” she said. “I feel very fortunate and blessed, to have worked on shows that lived for a while.”
She recalled the insane popularity of “Bell”:
After “90210” concluded, Tiffani had the experience of starring in the Woody Allen film “Hollywood Ending” in 2002.
“It was strange but very cool,” she said in the www.meinmyplace.com article. “He flew the auditioning actresses to New York. I had no idea what I was auditioning for.
“With him you don't get a script, sometimes you might get an idea of the role you might be up for. So thirty minutes before I walked into the room to audition for him, they gave me sides to read... The whole time I auditioned, his eyes were closed.”
Since 2009 Tiffani has starred in the USA Network drama “White Collar,” playing the wife of an FBI special agent..
Nowadays, she said watching the show, “it just makes me cringe,. How I wore my hair like that – there was an amazing amount of Aqua Net in my bangs! Those tight biker shorts – what was I thinking? I didn't dress myself, but it's pretty embarrassing.”
A voluptuous woman who still rocks as a forty-something, Tiffani has always embraced her curves.
“There's pressure you feel to look a certain way and be a certain size,” she said in an interview with www.meinmyplace.com. “I was not the girl that was a size 2 and didn't work for it. I was never the waify model type.”
After Tiffani appeared on the cover of FHM magazine without a top, Howard Stern proclaimed she had the “most perfect breasts” in the world.
Her response: “Howard knows breasts.”
Born in Long Beach, California, Tiffani got her first TV acting job in a Barbie doll commercial when she was 8 and started modeling when she was 9.
“Classmates would throw trash at me in school,” she told www.blairmag.com. “They'd pin up the stuff I would do in catalogs and write stuff on it and then crumple it up and throw it at me. They didn't know it would hurt me in the way it did, but it's made me a stronger person.”
She competed in beauty pageants as a child and won Miss Junior America at age 13 in 1987. The following year she won Teen magazine's “Great Model Search,” and appeared on the cover. And in 1995 she was named Cover Girl magazine's Model of the Year, which helped land her role as Kelly on “Bell.”
Although in elementary school she went by Amber and she claimed she never liked the name Tiffani, she dropped Amber in her professional name before she started work on “90210.”
“It wasn't anything big. I think people thought a lot more had been put into it and it hadn't,” she said. “It's still on my driver's license.”
Tiffani said her personality was unlike either character.
“I was never clean, prissy and perfect like Kelly and I was never a pot smoking slut like Valerie,” she said in a 2001 interview with FHM magazine.
In fact, as a show-biz kid who was raised on studio sets, Tiffani couldn't really relate to any student.
“Being that I grew up in the business, I never went to school. I was never a cheerleader. I never went to the prom. I didn't have any of those experiences.”
“I remember Mark-Paul (co-star Gosselaar) and I touring the States and going overseas,” she told Yahoo TV. “That was the first time that I realized what an impact that show had when 5,000, 10,000 kids were showing up to these malls where we would sit there for hours and do autograph signings and pictures.
“That's when I was really like, 'Where am I? What is this?' Kids wanted my empty cup of water, things like that,” she said. “I had to constantly remind myself what I was doing was a job and I enjoyed my job and I was going back to school like all these other kids.”
“I admire the person [her character, Elizabeth Burke] strives to be. I admire her passion and her entire relationship with her husband. I admire that she's very strong in her career and owns her own business.”
Tiffani admitted that if she wasn't an actor, she would want to make her living as her character does, as an event planner, or as a caterer.
