CSI BEAUTY’S CHILDHOOD PHOTO ALBUM
Star Magazine
January 8, 2002
By Steven Strauss
Blooming Beauty: Young Marg wore glasses and short hair in eighth and ninth grades, but the ugly ducking became a beautiful swan by the time she was a senior in high school.
Dealing with gruesome corpses on the CBS hit CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is a breeze for gorgeous Marg Helgenberger. The actress spent her teen years working in a bloody slaughterhouse!
Helgenberger, 43, who plays forensic scientist Catherine Willows, had a dirty job at the Spencer Meat Packing Plant near her tiny hometown of North Bend, Neb., which was “downright disgusting at times,” Marg said.
“One of the jobs I had was cutting out the blood clots on a side of beef,” she reveals.
“You’d stick your knife in sometimes and pop a spot and it would bleed in your face. I once got knocked into the inedibles tub and found myself knee-deep in gristle, bone and fat. It was not a pleasant experience.”
But the redheaded beauty persevered and put herself through Kearney State College by cutting up cow corpses.
“It was hard, miserable work,” she recalls, “but it helped pay for college, so I can’t complain.”
It wasn’t all hard work and no play for the pretty star, however, as you can tell from these exclusive photos.
She was active in many extracurricular activities at North Bend Central High School, playing on the volleyball team, singing in the glee club and playing French horn in the band.
Although she went through a gawky awkward phase as a child, she had blossomed into a Midwestern stunner by the time she was a senior in high school.
She was tapped to play the lead in the school musical Once Upon a Mattress.
That role changed her life, and she has drama teacher Maryann von Rein to thank.
“I suggested to Marg that she should try out for the theater class,” von Rein proudly recalls.
“It’s a fantastic feeling, and I tell everyone that she was my student. But Marg did all the hard work and deserves all the credit.”
After college, the actress’ star rose steadily.
Helgenberger has been a fan favorite ever since her powerful role as drug-addicted hooker K.C. Koloski on the Vietnam War series China Beach in the late ‘80s.
She married fellow actor Alan Rosenberg – best known for his work on L.A. Law – in 1989. They have a son, Hugh, 11.
But the beauty is never far from her meat-packing roots, which she still remembers fondly.
“People ask me now why I’m not a vegetarian, which I’m not,” Helgenberger says.
“It was a way of life. Peoples say it’s disgusting, and it probably was, but I was used to it. I grew up around it.”