Candice Patricia Bergen (born 9 May 1946) is an American actress and former fashion model, best known for her starring role on the television situation comedy Murphy Brown. She won five Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards as Best Actress in a TV Comedy for the role. More recently she has starred as Shirley Schmidt, the legal partner of Denny Crane (played by William Shatner), on the ABC comedy-drama Boston Legal. Earlier in her career she starred in the Revisionist Western based on a true story, Soldier Blue, and went on to appear in major films including Carnal Knowledge, The Wind and the Lion, and Gandhi, receiving an Oscar nomination for her role in Starting Over.

Bergen was born in Beverly Hills, California. Her mother, Frances Bergen (née Westerman), was a Powers model who was known professionally as Frances Westcott. Her father, Edgar Bergen, was a ventriloquist, comedian, and actor. Her paternal grandparents were Swedish-born immigrants who anglicized their surname. As a child, Bergen was irritated at being referred to as Charlie McCarthy's little sister, Charlie McCarthy being her father's star puppet.

Bergen began appearing on her father's radio program at a young age, and in 1958, at age eleven, with her father on Groucho Marx's quiz show You Bet Your Life as Candy Bergen. She said that when she grew up she wanted to design clothes. In 1966, Bergen made her screen debut playing an aloof university student in The Group (1966), which delicately touched on the then-forbidden subject of lesbianism. The same year, she played the role of Shirley Eckert, an assistant school teacher in the movie The Sand Pebbles, which was nominated for several Academy Awards. In 1970 Bergen starred in a political satire called "The Adventurers", playing a frustrated socialite who has a lesbian affair. In (1975) she starred with Sean Connery in The Wind and the Lion, playing the role of a kidnapped American woman in the Moroccan desert.