Trivia: One known for straddling careers as a model, singer and actress, performer Milla Jovovich sported an utterly unique square-jawed look and the starkest of features that betrayed her Eastern European origins. Born to a Russian actress and a Yugoslavian doctor in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev on December 17, 1975, Jovovich moved with her family to Sacramento, CA, when she was five. She began her professional modeling career at the age of 11, spending most of her teen years displaying her exotic, blue-eyed beauty on the covers of numerous magazines and in service of countless products.While pursuing a successful modeling career, Jovovich also began acting, appearing in Zalman King's softcore Two Moon Junction (1988) as Sherilyn Fenn's little sister and Return to the Blue Lagoon, the 1991 sequel to the endearingly awful Brooke Shields flesh-fest Blue Lagoon (1980). Following a role in Richard Linklater's high-school slacker opus Dazed and Confused (1993), Jovovich took a break from acting and also put her modeling career on hold. She turned instead to music, recording an album, The Divine Comedy, that received surprisingly good reviews. After touring for a few months, Jovovich returned to California and revived her acting career with the help of French director Luc Besson, who cast her in The Fifth Element in 1996. An incredibly stylish sci-fi chase film set in the 23rd century, it featured Jovovich as a tangerine-haired alien, speaking in gibberish and wearing little more than artfully placed ace bandages designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. The film put her back on the Hollywood radar, something given further assistance by Jovovich's marriage to Besson (married in 1997, the two divorced in 1999). The following year Jovovich had a substantial role as a prostitute in Spike Lee's He Got Game, and, in 1999, she again stepped in front of the camera for Besson, this time to play the title role in The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. She received strong notices for her work, although the film itself earned less than a warm reception. The following year, Jovovich appeared in Wim Wenders' futuristic The Million Dollar Hotel as a mental patient in the titular establishment. In 2001, Jovovich once again stepped into the lead, this time battling the undead in the action-oriented film version of the popular survival horror video game Resident Evil (2002).As the years progressed, that assignment would continue to color and define Jovovich's choices, as she soon agreed to headline each of the follow-ups, Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) and Resident Evil: Extinction (2007). The films received critical excoriation for their mindless, effects-heavy setups and nearly incoherent premises, but no matter: the franchise caught on with the public in a big way and turned Jovovich into an A-list action star, paving the way for the lead role in the nearly indistinguishable outing Ultraviolet (2006). In the meantime,Jovovich occasionally tackled varied material. She delivered a particularly off-beat and quirky performance as a singer who drifts into a Yiddish music career in the comedy-drama Dummy (2004), and in the role of Drusilla in director Gore Vidal's remake of Caligula.She worked alongside Robert DiNiro and Edward Norton in 2009's psychological drama A Perfect Getaway, and returned to the Resident Evil series in 2010 with Resident Evil: Afterlife. Jovovich played Milday de Winter in 2011's The Three Musketeers, and headlined yet another Resident Evil in 2012, Resident Evil: Retribution. In 2014, she appeared in an updated version of Shakespeare's Cymbeline.

Trivia: As legend has it, when director Karyn Kusama was casting the lead for her directorial debut, Girlfight, she wanted to find a young woman who would radiate the powerful, surly charisma of the young Marlon Brando. Her search for an actor with this enviable but elusive quality ended when Michelle Rodriguez, a 20-year-old Latina whose previous experience was limited to work as an extra, answered an ad in Backstage magazine that Kusama had posted. Cast as Diana Guzman, the fierce and vibrant protagonist of Kusama's story of a high school girl who takes up boxing, Rodriguez went on to earn almost universal acclaim for her powerful portrayal, winning the admiration of audiences and critics from Sundance to Toronto.Of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent, Rodriguez was born in Bell County, TX, on July 12, 1978. She moved around throughout her childhood and adolescence, living for a time in Texas, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Jersey City, NJ. It was while she was working as an extra in various film productions that she answered Kusama's ad for actors; after being cast as Girlfight's protagonist, she trained intensively to condition her body like that of a boxer to such a degree that, at one point, she was even asked to go pro. Her dedication to the physical and emotional demands of her character paid off lavishly, when Girlfight premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival it received the Grand Jury Prize, with Rodriguez's performance singled out as one of the most exciting breakthroughs in years; among the many kudos she subsequently received was the National Board of Review's prize for Best Breakthrough Performance.Rodriguez's status as one of the year's New Hot Young Thangs on the Block was duly reflected by the attention she was subsequently paid in both the media and Hollywood. In the following year, her projects included Rob Cohen's The Fast and the Furious, an urban adrenaline extravaganza in which she played the tough girlfriend of a gang leader alongside Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Jordanna Brewster, and 3 A.M., a made-for-cable drama which cast her as a taxi driver and was screened at the Sundance Festival.Striving to maintain the balance between sexy and tough, Rodriguez would take on zombies in Resident Evil (2002) before hitting the waves in Blue Crush. Though neither film proved a bona fide box-office smash, they did offer the up and coming actress the exposure needed to develop an enduring career. Rodriguez could next be seen opposite Colin Farrell in the hard-hitting action thriller S.W.A.T. In 2005, Rodriguez appeared briefly on the first season of NBC's endlessly enigmatic primetime drama Lost as Ana Lucia Cortez, a tough cop with a shady past. She reprised the role in the following season, when she clashed heads with fellow flight survivor Jack (Matthew Fox) and struggled with her changing status within the group. The actress also starred in The Breed and Battle in Seattle, and co-stars as a tough-as-nails pilot in Avatar (2009), director James Cameron's science fiction adventure.

Trivia: Though indie-savvy moviegoers may recognize Eric Mabius for his roles in the mid-'90s art-house hits Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), Mabius's journey to mainstream recognition has been slow and steady as the talented actor assuredly made his way to starring in such wide-release films as Resident Evil (2002) and Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004). Born April 21, 1971, in Pennsylvania, Mabius studied film, dance, and sculpture at Sarah Lawrence College starting in 1990. Gaining experience in numerous off-Broadway roles, the aspiring actor (who often resembled a young Harrison Ford, with that actor's concomitant appeal) soon landed his first film role in director Todd Solondz's satirical Dollhouse. As the object of awkward seventh-grader Dawn "Weinerdog" Weiner's affection, Mabius's humorous performance raised a few eyebrows as well as a few chuckles. Following strongly with roles in Warhol, Lawn Dogs (1997), and The Minus Man (1999), Mabius turned up in increasingly prominent roles, with his turn as a closeted athlete in Cruel Intentions (also 1999) kicking his career into high gear. Taking over for the late Brandon Lee in the role of the Crow for 2000's The Crow: Salvation, Mabius had ironically auditioned for the role of Funboy in the first entry (a role that eventually went to Michael Massee, the actor who fired the gun shot resulting in Lee's untimely death).2002 found Mabius in his most prominent mainstream role to date as he joined the cast of the popular video game turned movie franchise Resident Evil. The film grossed upwards of $100 million giving Mabius enough exposure to land him the only leading male role in the 2004 debut season of Showtime's lesbian drama series The L Word. Though the role was diminished to an occasional guest-spot in subsequent seasons, Mabius remained a presence on the small screen with a multi-episode arc as Dean Jack Hess on Fox's The O.C. and a starring role in the short-lived ABC mystery show Eyes. In 2005, Mabius appeared in two minor films: the police actioner Venice Underground and the slasher movie Reeker. In the former, the actor plays an undercover agent who must help his partners track down the murderer of a narcotic agent, in the latter, the obnoxious Ecstasy supplier of a serial killer's victim. He also made a particularly huge splash on the small screen, as Daniel Meade, the fashion editor boss of "ugly duckling" Betty Suarez (America Ferrera) in the blockbuster prime-time series Ugly Betty (2006), adapted from a popular Spanish telenovela.

Trivia: A classically trained British actor who nearly became the successor to the James Bond franchise, handsome and talented James Purefoy made himself known to stateside audiences with roles in such high-profile releases as A Knight's Tale (2001) and Resident Evil (2002). Born James Brian Mark Purefoy (his surname meaning "good faith" in Norman French) in Taunton, Somerset, England, in 1964, Purefoy received his early education at the all-boys Sherbourne School (alma mater to such actors as Jeremy Irons) before later refining his acting abilities at the London School of Drama. After receiving his Actor's Equity Card following a stage performance of Equus, Purefoy joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and essayed stage roles in performances of such classics as King Lear and The Tempest. It wasn't long before Purefoy began to hunger for something more, and after making his small-screen debut in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1990), a career in television and films soon followed. Alternating between the small (Sharpe's Sword [1995], The Tide of Life [1996]) and silver (Jilting Joe [1997], Mansfield Park [1999]) screens for the majority of the 1990s, Purefoy began to gain more prominent roles in such romantic comedies as Bedrooms and Hallways (1998) and Maybe Baby (2000) around the time of the millennial turnover. The inevitable Hollywood becoming too much to resist, the talented actor began to turn up in such big-budgeted fare as A Knight's Tale and Resident Evil soon thereafter.

Trivia: Sited by Pierce Brosnan himself as a shining candidate to portray the first black James Bond, British actor Colin Salmon has made a name for himself across the pond with appearances in such Bond flicks as Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World is Not Enough (1999), and Die Another Day (2002); however, the handsome and silky-voiced actor admits to feeling a little too close to his punkish roots to take on such a worldly character this early in his career. Born in London, England, in 1965, Salmon found early fame as authoritative Sgt. Robert Oswald in the acclaimed television miniseries Prime Suspect 2 (1992). Even opposite such formidable talent as Helen Mirren, Salmon commanded the screen with his bold posturing and dense screen presence. Though the following decade brought frequent television work for Salmon in the U.K., it was through his turn as M's right-hand man in Tomorrow Never Dies that international audiences got a true sampling of his talent. As Salmon's overseas exposure began to gain the actor a wider fan base, his ability to alternate between relatively low-key British television and flashy Hollywood blockbusters proved a testament to Salmon's remarkable abilities as an actor. A role in British director Paul Anderson's Resident Evil (2002) proved a physically grueling start to a busy year, and with subsequent work in that same year's Dinotopia and Die Another Day, Salmon's career as a recognized actor truly began to flourish. In addition to his film work, Colin Salmon often lends his richly reverberating vocal chords to voice-over work, and he can frequently be found on the London stage.

Trivia: Studied at the University of Düsseldorf for only four semesters.Was a dressmaker apprentice.In 1988, lived in New Mexico for a few months in an effort to improve her English.In 1993, became one of the first video jockeys for VIVA channel.Resided with actor Daniel Craig in London in the early 2000s.Had to withdraw from the lead role in Hilde (2009) because she was pregnant, but a delay in production allowed her to work in the movie.Author of the book Keine Lieder über Liebe.

Trivia: Her television debut was age 10 in the drama film Coming Through, playing Helen Mirren's daughter. Quit acting for 3 years age 13 because she was being bullied; was chatted up by one of her bullies years later, who didn't recognise her. In 2012, played Violet in the musical The Fix at Union Theatre, London. Voiced the characters of Licia of Lendeldt and Milibeth in the video game Dark Souls II in 2014.

Trivia: Was raised in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary.Grew up in an artistic home, her mother was in a dramatic group while her father was in a musical group.Started her acting career in theater.Her work in Goldfish Memory (2003) earned her a nomination for an Irish Film and Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in Film/TV.Returned to work just six weeks after the birth of her daughter Ruby.Was a fan of the Harry Potter series before getting the role of Minerva McGonagall in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018).

Trivia: After a string of guest roles on TV and bit parts in movies, actress Marisol Nichols gained prominence as the lead in the 2001 made-for-television romantic drama The Princess and the Marine. Playing an Arab princess who falls in love with an American Marine, Nichols delivered a performance that earned her the Outstanding Actress in a Made for Television Movie or Miniseries prize at the 2002 American Latino Media Arts Awards. More supporting roles on TV followed until 2005, when Nichols landed the female lead opposite Ron Eldard on the Steven Bochco-produced cop show Blind Justice. The series proved to be short-lived, but Nichols' status as a lead performer was cemented, and in 2006 she was cast on the Kyle MacLachlan legal drama In Justice. That same year, she appeared with Martin Lawrence in the comedy sequel Big Momma's House 2. In 2007, In Justice got the axe from ABC, but not before Nichols joined the cast of Fox's hit serial 24 as Nadia Yassir, a U.S. counter-terrorism agent of Middle Eastern descent struggling with an atmosphere of deepening distrust toward Arabs in the wake of a fictional terrorist attack. For the next few years it appeared as if Nichols was focusing all of her energies toward television, with featuerd roles in The Storm, The Gates, and GCB following in quick succession, and serving well to keep ehr in the public eye.