Best known to U.S. moviegoers as Coco, the illegal Mexican immigrant who crosses the border illicitly to find herself at the mercy of an exploitative capitalist system (and face to face with the "kill floor"), in Richard Linklater's ambitious Fast Food Nation (2006), onscreen performer Ana Claudia Talancón actually made her first major cinematic splash several years prior. At age 18, Talancón landed the fem ...

Jessica Sutta was born on May 15, 1982, in Miami, FL, and from a young age showed a passion for dancing. She attended a local performing arts high school, eventually earning a spot on the dance team for the Miami Heat. Her skills also earned her parts in music videos for singers like Will Smith, Craig David, and Beyoncé, as well as snagging minor acting roles in movies like From Justin to Kelly. Sutta moved ...

Fashion model Melania Knauss is married to real estate tycoon Donald Trump. Born in Yugoslavia, in an area now a part of the Republic of Slovenia, in 1974, Knauss's career didn't begin to take off until she met Trump in New York. The couple has been together since 1999, with Knauss making occasional forays into modeling, and acting as one of the celebrity judges for the Miss USA pageant (which is owned by T ...

A model of Gallic elegance, cultivated lust object for art house filmgoers everywhere, and one of the best-respected actresses in the French film industry, Catherine Deneuve made her reputation playing a series of beautiful ice maidens for directors such as Luis Buñuel and Roman Polanski. The daughter of French stage and film actor Maurice Dorléac, Deneuve was born in Paris on October 22, 1943. She made her ...

The product of a profoundly unhappy home life, Andie MacDowell was compelled to make her own way from an early age. The Gaffney, SC, native spent her teenage years working a number of minimum-wage jobs before dropping out of Winthrop College when she was a sophomore in order to become an Elite model. Her innocent, well-scrubbed good looks were not only suited to her job as a cosmetics model, but, in 1984, t ...

Lithe, blonde Monet Mazur toiled in bit-part obscurity for several years before capturing attention with a role in Ted Demme's cocaine biopic Blow (2001). Named for her dad's favorite painter, Mazur grew up in Malibu familiar with the entertainment world through her record industry father and model mother. While still in her teens, Mazur began acting professionally with a bit role in the popular movie seque ...

A former top model who went on to utilize her smoldering sensuality as Bond girl Holly Goodhead in 1979's Moonraker, actress Lois Chiles crafted a successful onscreen career with roles in such acclaimed indies as Diary of a Hit Man (1991) and Curdled (1996). A native of Alice, TX, who graduated from the University of Texas in 1969, Chiles was discovered by a Glamour magazine photographer while attending Fin ...

Widely known for her role on NBC's prime-time series Sunset Beach, Susan Ward actually began her career as a model long before she was an actress. Born on April 15, 1976, she was raised in Monroe, LA, and signed with the Ford modeling agency in New York when she was just 13. The huge-eyed, beautiful blonde would be published in a lot of print work while spending time between New York and Louisiana as a teen ...

A buxom blonde with a wicked jaw and a goofball bearing, Jenny McCarthy was briefly hyped in the 1990s as a Lucille Ball-Marilyn Monroe hybrid. She got her start posing nude for Playboy magazine in 1993, and ended up becoming that year's Playmate of the Year. McCarthy parlayed that fame into a breakthrough role hosting the MTV dating show Singled Out. That led to her own sketch comedy show on MTV, The Jenny ...

A budding TV star, Jennifer Esposito opted to focus more exclusively on movies after landing one of the lead roles in Spike Lee's incendiary Summer of Sam (1999). A native New Yorker, Esposito trained at the Lee Strasberg Institute and worked on TV in the early 1990s, including a recurring role on New York Undercover. Following small roles in indie films Kiss Me, Guido (1997) and A Brother's Kiss (1997), Es ...