Denise Lee Richards is an American actress and model born on 17 February 1971 in Downers Grove, Illinois. She was raised in the Chicago area before her family relocated to Oceanside, California, when she was fifteen, and she began working as a model before moving into television guest roles and, later, film.
Richards's breakthrough film roles came in the late 1990s. She played rookie space trooper Carmen Ibanez in the science-fiction adventure 'Starship Troopers' (1997), one of a pair of scheming femme fatales in the thriller 'Wild Things' (1998), and physicist Christmas Jones opposite Pierce Brosnan's 007 in the James Bond film 'The World Is Not Enough' (1999). She also appeared in the comedy 'Drop Dead Gorgeous' (1999).
Richards's family background has been described as a mix of German, French-Canadian, Irish, English and Welsh ancestry. The specific claim, often repeated online, that her Welsh heritage comes through her father in particular could not be independently confirmed from reliable sources, so her link to Wales is best understood as one strand of a broader, mixed family history rather than a documented personal connection to the country.
In the following decades Richards continued working steadily in television, including a long-running role as Shauna Fulton on the CBS soap opera 'The Bold and the Beautiful', which she joined in 2019 and returned to again in 2026, and a stint on the Bravo reality series 'The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills', which she joined for its ninth season in 2019.