Lisa Ann Walter (born August 3, 1963) is an American actress, comedian, and television producer, best known for her roles as Chessy the housekeeper in the romantic comedy film The Parent Trap (1998) and Melissa Schemmenti on the Peabody Award winning ABC mockumentary sitcom Abbott Elementary (2021–present), for which she received a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Ensemble in a Comedy Series.
She was formerly the creator and executive producer of Oxygen network reality weight-loss competition series, Dance Your Ass Off.[1] Her other reality television work includes her stint as a judge on ABC's reality television series The Next Best Thing: Who Is the Greatest Celebrity Impersonator?, and as winning celebrity editions of the game shows The Weakest Link and Jeopardy! She also created and starred in the 1996–1997 sitcom, Life's Work, and appeared in such films as Bruce Almighty, Shall We Dance, and War of the Worlds.
Walter was born on August 3, 1963, in Silver Spring, Maryland.[2] She and her older sister, Laura, are the children of a geophysicist British father who was born in France of Alsatian descent and a substitute-teacher/mother who was born in Sicily. The family lived in different places following their father's work, and their childhood homes included Germany and the suburbs of Washington, D.C.[3][4] She graduated with a theater degree from Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in 1983.[3]
After five years of standup comedy, Walter starred in her own Fox Network comedy series, My Wildest Dreams (1995), followed by an ABC sitcom, Life's Work (1996–1997), which she both created and starred in. Walter also co-starred in the Bravo series Breaking News and in the NBC sitcom Emeril.[5] She played Whoopi Goldberg's tarty sidekick Claudine in Eddie (1996).
Walter co-starred in the Disney film The Parent Trap (1998); in the remake of the original film, she appeared as Chessy, the nanny to Dennis Quaid's character's daughter, who was played by a young Lindsay Lohan. Since then, she played supporting roles in the comedy Bruce Almighty (2003) and the romantic comedy Shall We Dance (2004).
In early 2007, Walter had a supporting role as Mabel, the bartender in the MyNetworkTV soap opera Watch Over Me. Later that May, she served as a judge on the ABC reality TV show The Next Best Thing, which searched for the best celebrity impersonators in America. In early 2008, Walter was in the comedy film Drillbit Taylor, and also starred in the VH1 reality series Celebracadabra, in which celebrities competed to see who was the best magician among them. She made it to the final three but was eliminated in the sixth episode. She has developed a series for the Oxygen network called Dance Your Ass Off. On December 19, 2011, she played a dramatic role on the TNT series Rizzoli & Isles as a ballet coach.
Her comic memoir, The Best Thing About My Ass Is That It's Behind Me, was published in May 2011.[6] Beginning in May 2011, Walter hosted The Fabulous Lisa Ann Walter Show, a talk show on the Los Angeles radio station KFI. The program aired for three hours each Saturday and Sunday. In August 2014, Walter quit to focus on her acting career.[7]
Since 2021, Walter appears in the ABC comedy Abbott Elementary as second grade teacher Melissa Schemmenti.[5][8] Walter, alongside the show's ensemble cast, won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series at the 2023 ceremony[9] and was nominated again the following year.[10]
On October 20, 2022, Walter received the Virtuoso Award at the San Diego International Film Festival.[11][12] In 2024, she won the second season of Celebrity Jeopardy!, defeating Mo Rocca and Katie Nolan in the finals. She won $1 million for the Entertainment Community Fund.[13]
In 1983, she married fellow actor Sam Baum. They had a son, Jordan (1988), and a daughter, Delia (1992)[14] before divorcing in 1999. She has twin sons, Spencer and Simon Walter (11 October 2000).[15][16][17][18]
Born in Bellefonte to a geophysicist father born in Alsace and a substitute teacher mother from Sicily, Walter and her older sister, Laura, grew up on the road as their father's profession took them to the Max Planek Institute in Germany and NASA positions in the Washington, D.C. area.
twin sons born on the day as the twins in the Parent Trap movie, but two years later