Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin
Kathy Kinney
Actress best known as Mimi Bobeck on The Drew Carey Show; born and raised Stevens Point (SPASH 1972)
$6 million
Kathy Kinney is the Stevens Point native whose painted Mimi Bobeck face became one of the most recognizable comic characters of 1990s network television. On The Drew Carey Show she lasted nine seasons and 233 episodes after what was meant to be a one-shot cosmetics-counter bit in the pilot: an applicant whose makeup looked applied with a trowel. The audience refused to let her leave, and Mimi became Drew’s on-screen nemesis, complete with muumuus and war paint. She was born in Stevens Point on November 3, 1954, to Harold Kinney, an automobile dealer, and Marian Kinney, and grew up on the south side a block and a half from the Point Brewery. The plant whistle at seven, noon, and five ran the household; she still calls that neighborhood the wrong side of the tracks. After her father died of emphysema when she was fifteen, she became the family’s handyman in coveralls. A cemetery a block away supplied headstones as pretend horses and mausoleums as dance halls. She graduated from Stevens Point Area Senior High in 1972, spent time with the California Conservation Corps including a Kings Canyon backcountry season, and later worked a secretary’s desk at WCBS in New York. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point in the 1970s and finally finished the degree in 2016. She still comes home for United Way events, antique stores, and the brewery. Marian’s rule still holds: be home when the whistle blows. The city tie is the south-side childhood and SPASH, not the campus degree that came decades later.