Sherri Shepherd celebrated 30 years in the entertainment industry with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The actress, comedian, and talk show host was honored on Monday, Nov. 3, with the 2,827th star on the Los Angeles landmark.
Fans lined the sidewalk in front of the W Hotel at 6258 Hollywood Blvd. to watch the ceremony.
Related: Sherri Shepherd Learned to ‘Pay It Forward’ After Getting Financial Help From Whoopi Goldberg
Inside the velvet rope, Shepherd was joined by her son Jeffrey Tarpley, her friends Niecy Nash and Tyler Perry, and television producer Ira Bernstein, who is co-president of Debmar-Mercury which distributes her daytime talk show, Sherri.
Bernstein told the audience what you see on screen is real.
“There’s a saying in television, ‘that if you’re on every day, your real self shows through.’ In Sherri’s case, that’s her superpower. What you see on screen is truly who she is — warm, authentic, full of joy and genuinely in love with what she does every day,” Bernstein said.
A beaming Shepherd said she always had big dreams.
“I’ve dreamed about having my own talk show since I was a little girl,” she said. “I used to always dream that I was going to be somebody, ’cause on my report card it always said, ‘Sherri is amazing and she’s wonderful, but she talks too much.'”
She joked that she knew all that talking “was going to pay off.”
In a more serious moment, Shepherd shared the honor with her 20-year-old son, who was born prematurely and later diagnosed with autism.
“My biggest shout-out is to my son, Jeffrey Tarpley, my son who was born at 25 weeks, a pound and 10 ounces, and everybody told me he wouldn’t be here,” she said. “Everything that I do, everything that I am, is for my baby. He’s 20, but he’ll always be my baby.”
Perry, who wrote and directed her most recent film Straw, called Shepherd a friend.
“There are many people on the planet that were sent here to bring light, and then there are other people who are here to be light. Sherri is a person who is light. When she walks in the room, you feel it, you know it. She makes everybody feel seen,” Perry said.
Nash recalled working with Shepherd on the 2005 romantic comedy Guess Who, and in the TV Land series The Soul Man. She said they both made sacrifices along the way, and now they both have stars on the Walk of Fame.
“You will never know what it costs her sometimes to make other people laugh and to make them feel,” Nash said. “I would’ve never thought that these two girls… would both have stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame right across the street from each other.”
Shepherd was born in Chicago in 1967, and started acting in the ’90s. She landed a role on the short-lived WB comedy Cleghorne!
After that, she had guest roles on a string of TV shows, including Living Single and Friends. Among her other TV credits were parts in Suddenly Susan, Emeril, Less Than Perfect, The Wedding Bells, the 2009 Lifetime comedy Sherri, as well as Everybody Loves Raymond, How I Met Your Mother, The Jamie Foxx Show, Call Your Mother, and The Sex Lives of College Girls.
Her big break in the talk show world came as a co-host on The View from 2007-14, which led to a daytime Emmy Award.
Shepherd was one of several fill-in hosts on the final season of The Wendy Williams Show. Her bubbly personality set her apart and helped her land her own syndicated talk show titled Sherri, which launched in 2022.
Fans can next see her up close, when she kicks off a five-month comedy tour in January.
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