Terry Farrell was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. At age 15, she became a foreign exchange student to Mexico, and from that experience she decided she would like to live a more adventurous life in the big city. She sent several photos to a modeling agency and then, at age 17, dropped out of high school and became a model in New York.
Alongside numerous TV credits, in 1992, she had the starring role in the horror movie Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, and had appeared in several television and straight-to-video movies. In 2017 Terry became engaged to TV director Adam Nimoy (son of Star Trek actor, Leonard Nimoy); Farrell and Nimoy were married in San Francisco on March 26 2018 on what would have been Leonard Nimoy's eighty-seventh birthday.
