Isn’t Meredith Baxter a perfect choice for our woman crush Wednesday this week? I mean she’s obviously gorgeous and a perfect blonde bombshell knock out and she’s a lesbian who has come out and come to terms with the struggles it takes to get to the point of accepting oneself but she’s also a well rounded television actor who has taken on both small roles and bigger roles that won her awards such as the role of Nancy Lawrence Maitland in Family.

It makes sense that Baxter is a great actress seeing as she grew up in a family that held arts jobs. She was born in South Pasadena, California to her mother, Whitney Blake, who was a former actress who changed over to the world of producing and directing (she was a co-creator for NBC’s One Day at a Time) and to her father, Tom Baxter a radio announcer.

It was in her senior year that Baxter started becoming more aware of the arts and training more exclusively in them. She attended Interlochen Center for the Arts while also staying in and graduating from Hollywood High School.

Her first break out television role was in a television show called Bridget Loves Bernie on CBS but unfortunately it was cancelled after only one season . After that she went on to play her most infamous role in Family and when that show ended she hopped on over to act alongside Annette O’Toole and Shelley Hack in the television show Vanities.

The last show she was on that was popular in the media was Family Ties. Baxter played the role of Elsye Keaton. She then decided to break out into film acting where she really tested her limits and the extents she could play in dramas as an actress. She played a housewife named Kate suffering from Bulimia in the movie Kate’s Secret and this was a huge deal as eating disorders are always a touchy topic and don’t often trickle into the mainstream media.

Then she played a kidnapper who was also a psychopath in The Kissing Place and in the movie The Betty Broderick Story she played a woman who killed her ex husband and his new girlfriend.

It may have been her incredible acting skills that kept her in the closet for so long but it was finally in 2009 that Baxter came out as a lesbian to the public it was in an interview with Matt Lauer on the show Today and she ended up marrying her girlfriend, Nancy Locke in 2013.

She was married two times previous and has five children in total. She has admitted that her being a closet lesbian has probably contributed to the downfalls of her previous marriages and relationships with men but she wouldn’t change it for the world with such beautiful children.

In 2014 Baxter joined the cast of The Young and the Restless playing the character of Maureen and it doesn’t seem like she’s going anywhere, anytime soon. She is our woman crush because she is an incredibly talented actress and has always shown to be a great person all around. We admire her strength for sharing her story with coming out and admitting that the failure of relationships that happens isn’t her fault or her partners but just unfortunate circumstances that surround it.

Stay tuned next week for our #wcw here on GirlfriendsMeet and if you haven’t seen it yet go check out our last week’s woman crush – Tracy Chapman