Chris Evert
Chris Evert is an actor, born 1954.
The screen credits are a footnote to one of the great sporting careers. Evert won 157 singles titles including 18 majors, spent 260 weeks ranked world number one, finished seven seasons as the year-end number one, and with Martina Navratilova formed the rivalry that carried women's tennis from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s. Nothing on this page competes with that, and she seems entirely aware of it.
What the filmography records is a former champion with a good sense of humour about her own image. She appears as herself in the commentary box in Wimbledon, which is straightforward casting, and then twice in 2015 in comedies that use her precisely because she reads as the sport's most disciplined figure: Trainwreck and the tennis mockumentary 7 Days in Hell. The second is the better joke. Putting the most composed player of her generation into an aggressively silly fake documentary about a match that will not end works because she plays it completely straight.
The older credits are the standard American celebrity circuit of the period, an American Masters appearance and a 1981 television special. There is no acting career here, and she has never pretended otherwise.
Movies (4)
TV (1)
Where to start with Chris Evert
The funniest thing on this list is 7 Days in Hell, and it is short. Its comedy runs on real tennis figures delivering absurd testimony with total conviction, and Evert is one of the reasons the format holds. Watch that first.
Trainwreck is the other 2015 credit and the wider film, and she turns up in it in a way that trades on how thoroughly the audience already knows who she is. Wimbledon is the one where she does the actual day job, commentating inside a romantic comedy, which is a strange and pleasant thing to watch. Beyond those, American Masters and the 1981 special Lynda Carter's Celebration are archive pieces for people who want to see how television presented her at the height of the rivalry.