- Was reportedly engaged to James Dean in 1952 and later wrote a book about their relationship, "Dizzy and Jimmy".
- Considered actress Elizabeth Montgomery to be her best friend.
- Started out in show business as a dancer. Met her future husband, Dale Wales, a jazz trumpeter, in Puerto Rico where they both were performing. They lived together from 1960 until 1985, when they married. They had one daughter. Sheridan and Wales remained married until his death from lung cancer. He left behind an $80,000 credit card debt and Sheridan subsequently had to file for bankruptcy.
- After a brief engagement to Justus Villa (aka Pancho), she realized she didn't want to marry him, broke it off, and returned, for a time, to New York City. There, at a party, she again met James Dean. Afterwards, in a cab, he told her, "Nothing's lost between us. It never will be. You're a part of me and I'm a part of you. I take you with me wherever I go." That was the last time she saw him.
- Media sources reported the coincidence her death came within a few weeks after the death of Estelle Harris (also at age 93) who played the mother of another Seinfeld character, George Costanza.
- Was a go go dancer in the 1950s.
- Father was Frank Sheridan, a classical pianist. Mother was Elizabeth Poole-Jones, a concert singer. She is the younger of their two daughters.
- Sheridan and actress Elizabeth Montgomery were best friends: Dizzy and Lizzie. Montgomery only took on the nickname "Lizzie" following her performance in the Emmy Award-winning TV movie, The Legend of Lizzie Borden; Dizzy was a shortened version of "Dizabeth," which is how her sister managed to pronounce her name when they were young. Dizzy and Lizzie each adored horses and together they frequented the Santa Anita race track.
- She spent much of her early career living and working in the Caribbean.
- Her first major role was playing nosy neighbor Raquel Ochmonek on the NBC TV series ALF, from 1986 to 1990. Following that she secured her most renowned and long-lived role, as Jerry's mother, Helen, in Seinfeld. She appeared in all nine seasons, from 1990 to 1998, the only actor to do so apart from the four leads.
- While working as a dancer in New York City nightclubs, Sheridan met the then-unknown James Dean. She wrote a book, Dizzy & Jimmy: My Life with James Dean: A Love Story, chronicling their time together in 1952. In it, she describes them as each other's first romantic love. "We had great times... We didn't want to be apart. We found a place and lived together... before he really hit it big." Dean pursued work on the stage in New York, with film roles in Hollywood soon to follow. Without sure footing or a serious plan, forging a future was not an option, thus bringing about the end of their relationship. "He was being hauled away into this career, and I couldn't follow him," she said in an interview.
- Working in Hollywood, she came to prominence in supporting roles in over a dozen feature films and 60 prime time network television movies, mini-series, and series including Kojak, Archie Bunker's Place, St. Elsewhere, Newhart, Moonlighting, The A-Team, Who's the Boss, Hill St. Blues, Cagney & Lacey, Family Ties, Murder, She Wrote, and Double Rush.
- Her parents separated when she was young, and she grew up with her mother in Westchester County, N.Y.
- She appeared in plays and musicals on Broadway, co-starring with Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd in the 1977 musical, Happy End, before moving to Los Angeles.
- In 2009, with Andy Griffith and Doris Roberts, Sheridan co-starred in the feature film Play the Game, a romantic comedy about a widowed grandfather who learns dating tricks from his serial romancer of a grandson. The film received attention for containing a sex scene between Sheridan and Griffith.
- Her father was of half Irish and half Ashkenazi Jewish (from Germany and England) descent. Her maternal grandparents were English immigrants.
- Has one daughter: Stephanie.
- In her early 20s she took her dance skills to New York, where she lived at the Rehearsal Club, a residence for young women in the arts. In "Dizzy & Jimmy: My Life With James Dean, a Love Story," a memoir published in 2000 ("Dizzy" was her childhood nickname), she wrote about a young man she met in the lobby of that building one day in 1951. It was James Dean, then an unknown from Indiana who at the time had a job testing stunts for the game show "Beat the Clock.".
- Early in 1953, Sheridan departed New York for the Virgin Islands.
- Together with a neighbor who had a dance troupe, she won a dance contest she choreographed for the first Carnival in St. Thomas.
- In the late 1960s, back in New York, she performed in one of Julius Monk's annual cabaret reviews at Plaza 9, located in the Plaza Hotel.
- Born on exactly the same date as Max von Sydow (of "Flash Gordon" and "The Exorcist" fame).
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