Lindsay Lohan

Lindsay Lohan was already an experienced performer when she made her feature debut in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap. Born in New York City, Lohan began modeling at age three. After appearing in numerous TV commercials, Lohan moved to series TV with a role on the soap operaAnother World from 1996 to 1997. Cast as The Parent Trap's scheming twin sisters after a six month search for just the right girl, Lindsay Lohan succeeded in filling Hayley Mills' shoes, winning over audiences with her pert charm as both the Californian Hallie and the British-raised Annie. She subsequently starred in the Disney TV film Life-Size (2000). Subsequently cast in actress Bette Midler's short-lived sitcom Bette, Lohan took a turn as a teenage gossip columnist (Get a Clue 2002 classic, Freaky Friday (2003). Stepping into the shoes formerly filled by Jodie Foster, Lohan and co-star Jamie Lee Curtis brought a winning, new chemistry to the film that made it a sleeper summer hit.

Lindsay Lohan kicked off 2004 with her first big starring vehicle, the comedy Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Met with mixed reviews and modest box-office receipts, the film didn't cross over from the teen audience the way Friday did. Only a mere two months later, Lohan proved she could carry a film. The Tina Fey-penned Mean Girls debuted at number one, recouping its budget and then some in its first week of release. The spotlight on the then-16-year-old Lohan changed almost overnight, as she quickly became a tabloid fixture: speculation on her body, her nightclubbing, her string of high-profile boyfriends, her incarcerated father, and her feuds with a variety of other young female celebrities became inescapable. Perhaps predictably, 2004 also saw Lohan branch out into the world of pop music with the album Speak; the supposedly confessional -- and similarly undistinguished -- A Little More Personal followed in 2005.

All of the hullabaloo seemed to have little effect on her work, as Lindsay Lohan starred in Herbie: Fully Loaded for Disney suffering a bout of exhaustion on set -- before graduating to more adult fare with Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion. Playing a morose poetess, the young actress ably held her own against Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin when the film opened in 2006; around that time, her first shot at a grown-up romantic comedy, Just My Luck, opened to little notice from the public or critics.