There’s a version of this story where Caprice stays in Hacienda Heights, marries a dentist, and shows up once a month at book club with a Costco cheesecake. That’s not the version we got.
We got the girl who started out waiting tables at sixteen, staring down the barrel of regular life in La Puente Catholic school uniform, and quietly deciding that “regular” wasn’t going to cut it.
The girl from Hacienda Heights
Caprice Valerie Bourret comes into the world in 1971, the elder daughter of a French-Canadian estate agent and an American interior designer who knew more about color palettes than stability. The parents split when she’s four, divorced by the time she’s six. After that, it’s her, her little sister, and a single Jewish mom trying to keep everyone fed and vaguely sane in the outer orbit of Los Angeles.
She does the Catholic school thing at Bishop Amat, soft-focus suburbia on the outside, sharp elbows and teenage hustle on the inside. At sixteen she’s already working—waiting tables, figuring out tips and charm and how fast people judge you the second you walk up to a table. It’s a good warm-up for what’s coming: an entire adult life built on first impressions.
From diner refills to magazine covers
Most models get discovered a thousand times in the retelling—at a mall, at a café, at a bus stop in the rain. However it happened, Caprice ends up in front of cameras instead of ketchup bottles. She’s tall, blonde, photogenic in that ‘90s way that made magazine editors think of sex, aspiration, and an easy headline.
She leaves the sleepy bits of California behind and goes global: Vogue, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Maxim, FHM, Playboy, Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. Two hundred and fifty covers plus, which is less a career and more a one-woman print invasion. British tabloids crown her “the world’s sexiest woman”, GQ calls her Woman of the Year, Maxim hands her International Woman of the Year three years running.
The point isn’t subtle: in the pre-Instagram era, if you were a straight man with a pulse and a newsstand nearby, you probably knew her face.
Big brands notice. Diet Coke wants her holding a silver can. Pizza Hut wants glamour with pepperoni. The ‘90s are a time when a billboard could make you a household name, and Caprice rides that wave like a pro.
Trying on pop star for size
Like any self-respecting late-’90s celebrity, she takes a swing at pop stardom. Virgin Records signs her, figuring the name alone will move units. “Oh Yeah” hits the UK charts, climbing to 24. “Once Around the Sun” does the same trick a couple years later. It’s glossy, catchy, the kind of thing you hear twice on a Saturday night and then forget by Monday morning.
But that’s okay. The singles aren’t really about becoming the next Madonna. They’re about solidifying the brand: Caprice as all-purpose fantasy—model, singer, TV face, the woman who seems to live permanently on the VIP list of life.
The business underneath the bikinis
The problem with being a poster girl is that posters come down. The smarter ones figure out how to put their name on something that keeps earning while gravity does its work.
In 2000, Caprice slaps her name on a lingerie line with Debenhams, the kind of high-street marriage that makes every buyer’s job easier. It works. Six years later she does something rarer: she buys the rights back and starts her own company, By Caprice Products. No more just lending the face—now she’s designing, modeling, and owning the inventory.
Lingerie grows into swimwear and sleepwear, and then into Bedding By Caprice. It’s a very clean move: the woman who built a career in very little fabric now sells you the sheets you sweat on.
The business quietly does what businesses are supposed to do: ships units, pays salaries, builds a second life that doesn’t rely on flashbulbs.
Reality, but with better lighting
Of course, this is the 21st century. Nobody gets out of celebrity alive without doing reality TV.
Caprice jumps into that pool early and often: The Surreal Life, Celebrities Under Pressure, Celebrities Disfigured, Road Raja, a lap or two through Celebrity Big Brother, panel shows, guest judging spots on Project Catwalk, Britain’s Next Top Model, and later Style Wars in Ireland. She does Come Dine with Me and ties with Jimmy Osmond, which feels like something you should get a special badge for.
Then comes Ladies of London in 2014, Bravo’s attempt to graft American reality DNA onto British class neurosis. Caprice is an original main cast member, dropped into a petri dish of social climbers, old titles, and imported money. It’s a neat trick: the California Jewish glamazon as “London socialite,” marrying West Coast gloss to Notting Hill postcodes.
The show runs its course, the finale is aired, and she’s quietly let go. Reality TV is like that: it’ll ride your name while it’s convenient, then throw you overboard between seasons.
She keeps going anyway. There’s The Jump in 2017, where celebrities strap themselves to winter sports equipment and try not to die on live TV. There’s Celebs on the Farm. There’s Dancing on Ice, which ends abruptly when she and her pro partners part ways and withdraw. None of it rewrites television history, but it keeps the brand breathing, keeps the face on screen.
Lights, camera, Christmas
Somewhere along the way, the film work creeps in. Early on there’s Hollywood Flies, Nailing Vienna, Jinxed In Love, made-for-HBO projects that prove she can hit a mark and deliver lines. There are British soaps—Hollyoaks, Dream Team—and a spin through The Man with Rain in His Shoes.
Then, later, she finds her natural habitat: Christmas movies. In 2019 she shows up as Mrs. Ferdi in Christmas in the Highlands, one of those soft-focus holiday films where snowfalls, castles, and complicated love lives are all guaranteed.
By the mid-2020s she’s not just starring in them, she’s producing them. A Toast to Love, A European Christmas, A Scottish Christmas Secret—titles that sound like Hallmark fever dreams, with her playing leads and antagonists while her production company, JJLove Productions, gets its name in the credits.
It’s smart. Christmas movies get rerun forever. Syndication is the closest thing to immortality television offers.
Stage lights and off-Broadway detours
Despite the photo-shoot reputation, Caprice’s relationship with performance isn’t just posing. She plays Maureen in Rent in London’s West End, and joins The Vagina Monologues at the Arts Theatre.
Then there’s Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical, which is exactly what it sounds like—Caprice producing and starring as Lisa in an off-Broadway-born production in Johannesburg. It’s camp, raunchy, and knowing, the kind of thing that lets her lean into the joke rather than run from it.
The private life in the tabloids
The British press treats Caprice’s love life like a national hobby. The list of men she’s linked with reads like a mad lib of the late ‘90s and early 2000s: Rod Stewart, David Spade, Dennis Quaid, Lee Ryan, Prince Andrew back when people still invited him places, Calum Best, Fred Durst, footballers, businessmen, assorted rich and famous detritus.
The names were never really the point. They were proof of orbit—she was moving in the rooms where cameras followed.
The real story starts in 2011, when she begins dating American financier Ty Comfort. There are no guitar solos or tabloid tantrums, just a man with money and presumably a decent tolerance for chaos. In 2013 they double down on building a family in a way that sounds like a plot twist but isn’t: one son born via surrogate in August, another born a month later, carried by Caprice herself.
They’re not twins, technically, but raised as if they are—same birthday celebrations, same chaos level. It’s a very Caprice solution: if life won’t bend to your plans, find a medical workaround.
By 2019, she and Ty quietly get married at a London register office. No giant OK! magazine exclusive, no swan-filled fountains. Just paperwork, rings, and then back to Notting Hill to raise two boys and run a small empire built on lingerie, bedding, and Christmas movies.
Building your own myth
Caprice’s story isn’t the Hollywood fairy tale where the girl from nowhere becomes serious actress and collects Oscars like coasters. It’s grittier and more practical than that.
She took a face that sold magazines and turned it into a business. She rode reality TV without getting completely eaten by it. She learned that having your name on a clothing label is better than having it on a VIP list. And somewhere between Bishop Amat High School and Ladies of London, she figured out that the smartest thing a “sexiest woman in the world” can do is make sure she owns something besides her reflection.
Not bad for a girl who started out serving tables and dodging the gravitational pull of small-town normal.
