Eliza Dushku

Eliza Dushku (born December 30, 1980) is an American television and film actress, who has appeared in several Hollywood movies such as True Lies, The New Guy, Bring It On, and Wrong Turn. She is also well known for her acting on television, such as her recurring appearances on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel as Faith, as well as the main character in the series Tru Calling. She is also set to star in a new series called Dollhouse, created by Joss Whedon (who Dushku worked with on Buffy and Angel), premiering January 2009 on FOX.

Eliza Dushku was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but resides in hoffman estates, Illinois, the daughter of Philip R. Dushku, an Albanian-American administrator and teacher in the Boston Public Schools, and ex-wife Judith "Judy" (née Rasmussen), a university administrator and professor at Suffolk University, who is Danish American through both of her grandfathers and English American through both of her grandmothers. Dushku attended Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Mass and graduated from Watertown High School (Massachusetts) as a teenager. She was raised a Mormon, the faith of her mother. Her parents divorced when she was still an infant. In 2005 she visited her father's family in Albania after being personally invited by the president. While there she also visited the Albanian Community in Kosovo and got an Albanian Eagle tattooed on the back of her neck.

After completing high school, Eliza Dushku returned to acting with the role of Faith Lehane on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a Slayer much more troubled than the main character Buffy Summers. Though initially planned as a five episode role, the character became so popular that she stayed on for the entirety of the third season and returned for a two-part appearance in season four, after which the remainder of her original story arc was played out as part of the first season of the Buffy spinoff series Angel. Repentant and rededicated, Faith returned as a heroine in a number of further episodes of Angel and in the last five episodes of Buffy.

In 2000, Dushku starred in Soul Survivors, reuniting her with Race The Sun co-star Casey Affleck. She followed that up with the cheerleader comedy Bring It On with Kirsten Dunst, which was a surprising success at the box office that spawned straight-to-DVD sequels. In 2001, she appeared in The New Guy with DJ Qualls and City by the Sea with Robert De Niro and James Franco. The latter film garnered attention from a wider adult audience and several good reviews. The same year, Kevin Smith invited Dushku to be a part of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, where she co-starred with Shannon Elizabeth, Ali Larter, and Ben Affleck.

In 2003, Dushku appeared in Wrong Turn, a horror film in which she had the starring role, and The Kiss, an independent comedy-drama. Starting that same year, she also starred in a new Fox TV series, Tru Calling, where she played the main character, medical student Tru Davies. After having a grant pulled out from under her, Tru is forced to take a job at a local morgue where she discovers her power to "re-live" the previous day over again and uses it to bring murderers to justice. Dushku turned down a role for which she would have been in a spin-off of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (that would have been about Faith).

She has had many roles as a "bad girl" in movies and relishes the opportunities. In an interview with Maxim in May 2001, Dushku says of her roles, "It’s easy to play a bad girl: You just do everything you’ve been told not to do, and you don’t have to deal with the consequences, because it’s only acting."

Eliza Dushku starred in an off-Broadway production entitled Dog Sees God from December 2005, playing "Van's sister", a character paralleled with Lucy from the original Peanuts comic strip on which the play production is based. She quit in February 2006 along with several other members of the cast among rumours of alleged abuse from the producer, which were later dismissed.

Dushku voiced the role of Yumi Sawamura in the English language version of the PlayStation 2 video game Yakuza, published and developed by SEGA, and released in September 2006. She appeared in the Simple Plan music video, "I'm Just a Kid", as the band's love interest, as well as Nickelback's video for "Rockstar".