Trivia: A child performer who went on to become an adult actor in one of the more radical transformations in the history of the American entertainment industry, Sarah Jessica Parker has captained both a career and a public image that could be accurately classified under the heading Revenge of the Nerd. As a pubescent actor most famous for her roles in the acclaimed high school-set TV series Square Pegs and in the big screen's Footloose and Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Parker played the skinny girl with frizzy hair who was either the sidekick or underdog; when she wasn't cleaning up after Lori Singer in Footloose, she was battling snotty rich girls for the right to dance on local television in Girls Just Want to Have Fun. However, thanks to perseverance, talent, a fabulous stylist, and an HBO series called Sex and the City, Parker had emerged, by the end of the 1990s, as one of the most glamorous and employable actors around, known as much for the designer frocks she wore to awards ceremonies as for her work on the screen.Born in Nelsonville, OH, on March 25, 1965, as the fourth of eight siblings, Parker grew up in relative poverty following the divorce of her mother, an elementary school teacher, and her father, an aspiring writer. Raised by her mother and often out-of-work stepfather, she trained as a dancer and singer, bringing home paychecks from a young age. As a fledgling actor, Parker landed her first TV show at the age of eight; in 1976, after winning her first Broadway role in The Innocents, her family moved to New Jersey to encourage her career. Parker worked on the stage for the next few years, touring -- with four of her siblings -- in the national company of The Sound of Music and getting her first major break when she was chosen to take over the title role of Annie on Broadway, from 1979 to 1980.Continuing her training at the American Ballet Theater and the New York Professional Children's School, Parker made her film debut in the 1979 Rich Kids, which co-starred John Lithgow, Trini Alvarado, and Olympia Dukakis. In 1982, she won her first starring role in the aforementioned Square Pegs, and then received additional attention thanks to her role as Lori Singer's best friend and Chris Penn's girlfriend in the 1984 hit Footloose. The following year, Parker kept on dancing -- this time alongside a very young Helen Hunt -- in the similarly winning Girls Just Want to Have Fun. The actor's success in both films paved the way for steady work through the rest of the decade; in addition to her work on the big screen, Parker also starred in a number of TV shows, including the 1986 miniseries A Year in the Life and the drama series Equal Justice.The early '90s saw Parker segue into more adult roles, playing the Southern Californian creation SanDeE* alongside Steve Martin in L.A. Story (1991), then earning both critical and cult credibility as Nicholas Cage's fiancée in Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) and as the wife of consummate schlockmeister Ed Wood in Tim Burton's celebrated 1994 film about Wood's life and times. Offscreen, as well, she was garnering notice for her attachment to actor Matthew Broderick; Parker -- who had been in high-profile relationships with Robert Downey Jr. and John F. Kennedy Jr. -- married Broderick in 1997.Following a turn as Mia Farrow's daughter in the widely panned Miami Rhapsody (1995), supporting work in The First Wives Club and Burton's Mars Attacks! (both 1996), and a number of New York productions (including Sylvia, for which she earned a Drama Desk Award nomination), Parker landed the starring role of New York sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw on the new HBO series Sex and the City. Touted by some observers as the luckiest break in the actor's career to date, the show, which focused on the sex lives of four close friends (played by Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis) became a huge hit among both critics and viewers, ensuring Parker -- who won the Golden Globe for her work in 2000, 2001and 2002 -- both steady employment and an unimpeachably chic image that was eons removed from the bony elbows and frizzy bangs of her days as a square peg.Parker continued to appear in film roles during and after the Carrie Bradshaw years; among them include a starring role in The Family Stone (2005), and a supporting role in the 2008 comedy drama Smart People. In 2010 she starred in Sex and the City 2, and played a devoted mother attempting to balance her family with her career in 2011's comedy drama I Don't Know How She Does It.

Trivia: Kristin Davis first earned recognition as the pretentiously rich "schemer" she played on Fox's Melrose Place in the mid-'90s. As Brooke, she was constantly creating problems for the more regular characters, and just a year after gaining full-time character status, she had to be written off the show because of viewer dissatisfaction. However, doe-eyed Davis would find an abundance of work on television and in film, and demonstrate more versatility than she had as the "meanie" on Melrose. She was born on February 24, 1965, in Boulder, CO. After moving to Columbia, SC, with her family, she attended Rutgers University. She then moved to New York City, where she worked in theater and commercials for some time. In order to work on Melrose Place, starting in 1994, she relocated to Los Angeles. Davis made many television miniseries and movie appearances after her bout with Melrose Place, including appearances on ER and General Hospital. She had a bit part in Nine Months in 1995, and was featured in a TNT made-for-TV movie, The Heidi Chronicles, also starring Jamie Lee Curtis, that same year. In 1998, she had a small part in Sour Grapes, a comedy by Seinfeld writer Larry David. She then starred in two television motion pictures: Atomic Train in 1999, as Megan Seger, and Take Me Home: The John Denver Story in 2000, as Annie Denver, and co-starring with Chad Lowe. Also in 2000, she starred in the feature film Blacktop, and in 2001, appeared in a TV movie called Three Days with comedian Tim Meadows.When Sex and the City came to an end, she appeared in a handful of films including The Shaggy Dog and Deck the Halls before next appearing in the big-screen version of her iconic HBO series. She then appeared in Couples Retreat before taking part in the Sex and the City movie sequel. In 2012 she was the clueless mother in the family adventure movie Journey 2: The Mysterious Island.On the HBO series Sex and the City, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Davis played the innocent and adorable Charlotte York, a sweet and sensitive counterpart to the more blunt crassness of the program's three other female main characters. A striking contrast to the role she played on Melrose Place, Charlotte has provided Davis with a more diverse character range within the genre of drama-comedy on television.

Trivia: A true-blue New York actress who has worked on the stage and screen since her adolescence, Cynthia Nixon is probably best known to pop culture aficionados as Miranda Hobbes, the high-powered lawyer who has dated some of New York City's most dysfunctional men on HBO's Sex and the City. Although Nixon's starring role on the hugely popular series may have brought her to the attention of a new audience, observers of the New York theater had been watching the actor on and off Broadway since 1980, where she had performed in productions that included David Rabe's Hurlyburly, Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, Angels in America, and Indiscretions, for which she earned a Tony nomination.Born in New York City on April 9, 1966, Nixon made her film debut in the 1980 movie Little Darlings. She worked steadily through the rest of the decade, appearing in films ranging from Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City (1981) to Milos Forman's Oscar-winning Amadeus (1984) to Robert Altman's satirical Tanner '88, which cast her as the daughter of the titular politician. Nixon also worked on television, popping up in various miniseries, including the 1982 abortion drama My Body, My Child, in which she co-starred with Vanessa Redgrave and future Sex and the City co-star Sarah Jessica Parker. Continuing to appear on-stage in productions of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (for which she won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Award), and Philadelphia Story (for which she won a Theater World Award), Nixon also became a founding member of the off-Broadway theater group The Drama Dept. In 1998, after appearing onscreen sporadically throughout the 1990s, in such films as Addams Family Values (1993), the actor landed the most widely recognized role of her career up to that point, on Sex and the City. Co-starring alongside Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, and Kristin Davis, Nixon, as the hilariously caustic Miranda, enjoyed critical praise and a number of awards and nominations for her work on the show, which formed another entry on an already long and varied resumé. She would reprise the role for big screen adaptations of the show, in addition to movie roles in Lymelife and An Englishman in New York, as well as a popular turn on the Showtime series The Big C.

Trivia: A popular screen figure of the 1980s and '90s whose casting in HBO's runaway hit series Sex and the City provided her career with a solid second wind, Emmy-winning actress Kim Cattrall has endured to prove that older women can retain their sexuality and femininity while simultaneously maintaining a vital screen presence. Born in Liverpool, England, Cattrall's parents immigrated the family to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, when the future actress was three years old. After returning to England at age 11 to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Cattrall finished high school in Vancouver, and at age 16 struck out on her own after winning a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Though director Otto Preminger would sign Cattrall to a five-year contract and give the actress her film debut in Rosebud (1975), Universal would soon step in to buy out her contract, making Cattrall one of the last actors to participate in the now defunct Universal Contract Player System. Following with television appearances in Starskey and Hutch and Charlie's Angels, and turning up in such features as Deadly Harvest (1977), it appeared as if good things were in store for Cattrall in the future. The dawn of the 1980s found Cattrall's star ascending in such features as Porky's (1981), and with the release of Police Academy in 1984 her face was becoming a familiar one to film and television audiences.Following up with such typically '80s fare as Turk 182! (1985), Cattrall essayed the role of the green-eyed girl whose fate was questionable in John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China (1986), the year before her most famous (until Sex and the City of course) role in Mannequin (1987). Essentially a typical '80s throwaway comedy, Cattrall's effervescent presence, combined with Starship's catchy title tune "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now," gave the film such a boost that it even spawned a Cattrall-less sequel. It was following Mannequin that Cattrall's career began to stall in the wake of such instantly forgettable films as Honeymoon Academy (1990) and the Gary Busey actioner Breaking Point (1993), though her role in 1995's Live Nude Girls proved a curious precursor to her role on Sex and the City. A frank and funny HBO series based on the writings of New York Observer columnist Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City gave Cattrall a chance to shine as a lusty an unabashedly sexual PR executive whose confidence in the bedroom rivals only her confidence in the boardroom. A runaway hit that's popularity only grew as the show entered is sixth season, Sex and the City once again made Cattrall a household name as it influenced everything from fashion to the drinks of the New York scene. Cattrall's character made her a bigger pop culture icon than ever, and she would stick with the franchise throughout its spin-off movies, while also appearing in feature films like Ice Princess and The Ghost Writer.

Trivia: Born in 1959, Washington native Kyle MacLachlan, among other things, claims to be a descendent of the legendary composer Johann Sebastian Bach. However, unlike his very distant relative, MacLachlan made his mark not in music, but in television and film. After performing in a variety of local theater productions throughout his youth -- and acting out scenes from the popular Hardy Boys fiction series in his even younger years -- MacLachlan made his feature-film debut in director David Lynch's adaptation Dune in 1984. This would mark the first of many collaborations with Lynch; in 1986, Lynch cast MacLachlan as a young man shocked at what lies under a small town's picture-perfect facade in Blue Velvet. A year later, MacLachlan starred as an alien FBI agent in The Hidden, Jack Sholder's 1987 cult hit. MacLachlan, however, wouldn't gain true mainstream notoriety until 1989, when David Lynch called upon the young actor to play another FBI agent; this time, he was Special Agent Dale Cooper, who was sent to a small Washington town to investigate the murder of a young girl in ABC's popular but ultimately short-lived prime-time drama, Twin Peaks. The role would earn him two Emmy nominations for Lead Actor in a Drama Series and pave the way for more silver-screen roles, some of which include Ray Manzarek in Oliver Stone's The Doors (1991), villain Cliff Vandercave in The Flintstones (1994), and a falsely accused bank clerk in The Trial (1993). MacLachlan offered several relatively well-received starring and supporting performances throughout the mid- to late '90s, and did what he could for his role in Paul Verhoeven's famous 1995 flop, Showgirls.Luckily, the late '90s to early 2000s were much kinder to MacLachlan. In addition to playing another smooth agent in David Koepp's The Trigger Effect (1996), which some critics claimed was his best performance since Blue Velvet, the actor also was cast as King Claudius in Michael Almereyda's adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. However, it was television that once again made MacLachlan a household name, albeit temporarily. In 2000, he joined the cast of HBO's multiple-award-winning series Sex and the City as Charlotte's (Kristin Davis) mama's boy husband, Trey. In 2003, MacLachlan starred in the Bravo network's popular documentary series, The Reality of Reality. Over the coming years, McLachlan wouldenjoy successful arcs on popular TV shows, like How I Met Your Mother, Desperate Housewives, and Portlandia.

Trivia: The 5' 3," sandy blonde-haired Gen-Y icon Sarah Michelle Gellar's life story reads like a preteen wish fulfillment fantasy. Born in Manhattan in 1977 and discovered by an agent in a Manhattan restaurant at the age of four, Gellar signed for her first role (in the 1983 telemovie An Invasion of Privacy) not one week later. A plethora of bit parts in television series (Spenser: For Hire) and theatrical films (Over the Brooklyn Bridge, 1984; Funny Farm, 1988; High Stakes, 1989) followed, before Gellar landed a recurring role, in the early '90s, on the decades-long daytime soap opera All My Children. Throughout the early years of her career, Gellar was managed and supervised by her mother, a former nursery school teacher who insisted on straight A's as a prerequisite of an acting career. Sarah Michelle delivered, time and again.Despite the apparent fairy tale-like quality of her rise, Gellar reportedly battled several decidedly unhappy experiences as a child, including a parental divorce, decades of estrangement from her father, and social struggles in a New York City high school, experiences parlayed into her first (and most infamous) lead: that of Buffy, a California valley girl high school student-turned-"exterminator of the undead" in the early-'90s syndicated cult fantasy series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Gellar inherited the role from Kristy Swanson, who fleshed it out in the (decidedly more comic) 1992 theatrical release of the same name. Under Gellar's aegis, the show lasted seven years, from 1996 through 2003, and it became a massive international hit, garnering legions of fans. The subject matter of the series required the young actress to engage in rigorous exercise and physical training off-camera throughout Buffy's run.Gellar (a compulsive shopper and brand aficionado off-camera) then signed as a Maybelline spokeswoman and prepared to move into the third phase of her acting career. As Buffy wrapped, it coincided with the resurgence of American teen horror films led by Wes Craven's Scream series, and although Gellar did not join the cast of the first installment, her popularity on Buffy the Vampire Slayer thematically paved the way for involvement in one Scream sequel and one emulator: Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer (both 1997). In 1999, Gellar teamed up with two other notables of the same generation, Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe, for the Dangerous Liaisons teen update Cruel Intentions. As Kathryn Merteuil -- the depraved schemer who coaxes her stepbrother (Phillippe) into deflowering the school headmaster's daughter (Witherspoon), and thus inadvertently sets in motion a chain of disasters that will destroy them all -- Gellar played off of her wholesome, "all-American girl" image and helped turn the picture into a minor hit. Meanwhile, Gellar met and fell in love with Hollywood heartthrob Freddie Prinze Jr. (the son of the ill-fated, late-'70s Hispanic comedian Freddie Prinze), and the two married in Mexico in 2002, the same year they co-starred as Fred and Daphne for director Raja Gosnell in the live-action summer blockbuster Scooby-Doo. Two years later, Gellar and Prinze took the wheel of the Mystery Machine to fight a mischievous specter in 2004's Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. Gellar (long a student and admirer of Japanese culture) then traveled to Japan to do battle with some truly frightening entities in the 2004 J-horror remake The Grudge. In that effort, she plays an American student employed at a Japanese health center who uncovers a centuries-old curse that feeds off of anger and guides one victim after another into an unquenchable, violent rage.Subsequent vocal work on the animated cult hit Robot Chicken found the former vampire slayer having a bit of behind-the-scenes fun without the stress of appearing before the camera, and a role as an ambitious porn star teetering on the edge of the apocalypse in director Richard Kelly's eagerly anticipated Donnie Darko follow-up, Southland Tales, preceded a trip back into terror as a successful business woman haunted by a decades-old murder in the 2006 supernatural thriller The Return. In that picture, Gellar plays Joanna Mills, a thick-skinned, courageous Midwestern girl plagued by haunting supernatural visions, who attempts to uncover the origin of these specters. Unfortunately, that film opened to horrendous critical reviews and lackluster box office numbers in November 2006, appearing and disappearing quickly.Gellar would do plenty of voice acting in movies like the family-friendly CG-animated fairy tale Happily N'Ever After and the Weinstein-produced, CG-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Gellar would ultimately find continued success in TV, however, lending her voice to the animated sketch comedy series Robot Chicken, and her role on the series Ringer.

Trivia: With a rangy handsomeness that makes him look as if he would be equally comfortable branding cattle, Matthew McConaughey found fame shortly after making his screen debut in Richard Linklater's 1993 Dazed and Confused. After being cast in two high-profile 1996 films, Lone Star and A Time to Kill, the actor was soon being hailed as one of the industry's hottest young leading men, inspiring comparisons to such charismatic purveyors of cinematic testosterone as Paul Newman and Tom Cruise.A product of Texas, McConaughey was born in Uvalde on November 4, 1969 and raised in Longview. The son of a substitute teacher and a former member of the Green Bay Packers, he excelled in sports as a high school student and was voted "Most Handsome" by his senior class. After graduating, McConaughey spent some time working in Australia and then returned to the States to attend the University of Texas at Austin. It was there that he met producer and casting director Don Phillips, who introduced him to director Linklater, and, after directing from UT in 1993 with a degree in film production, McConaughey was cast in Dazed and Confused. Although his role as Wooderson, a slacker old enough to know better, was relatively small, McConaughey succeeded in winning a degree of immortality with lines like, "That's what I like about high school girls: I keep getting older, they stay the same age." After Dazed, McConaughey took on a number of supporting roles in films of varying quality, appearing in everything from 1994's Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre to 1995's Boys on the Side, in which he was cast as Drew Barrymore's straight-arrow cop boyfriend. The latter film won him some notice, heightened a year later when he was cast in John Sayles' acclaimed Lone Star. McConaughey made a distinct impression in his small but pivotal role as the town's beloved late sheriff, Buddy Deeds, and was duly given his first leading role in Joel Schumacher's 1996 adaptation of John Grisham's A Time to Kill. Although the film met with lackluster reviews, McConaughey managed to attract favorable attention, holding his own against Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey, and Sandra Bullock.Finding himself elected to the throne of Hollywood Golden Boy, a status cemented by his appearance on the cover of the August 1996 Vanity Fair, McConaughey paradoxically followed his initial success with a string of small, largely unseen films before landing a starring role as a property lawyer in Amistad, Steven Spielberg's 1997 slave epic. The same year, he also starred in Contact, playing a New Age theologian in Robert Zemeckis' adaptation of Carl Sagan's best-selling novel. After again collaborating with Linklater in 1998 on The Newton Boys, in which he starred alongside Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich, and Vincent D'Onofrio as the remarkably photogenic family of titular robbers, McConaughey banded together with off-screen pal Bullock on her directorial debut, the short Making Sandwiches, the same year. For all the hype surrounding the beginning of his career, by the time he was cast in the lead role of Ron Howard's EdTV, McConaughey had receded somewhat from the public eye, with many critics noting that despite his talent and physical attributes, the actor seemed to have trouble finding roles that would do him justice. But McConaughey's turn as the laid-back everyman who becomes an overnight celebrity when he allows his life to be broadcast on TV proved a relative success, with the actor winning praise for his endearingly dopey performance. The film itself garnered a number of positive reviews and gave a decent box office performance, and by the end of that year, McConaughey had his name attached to a number of projects, including those of his own production company, J.K. Livin'. In October 1999, McConaughey achieved notoriety of a different sort, when he was arrested for resisting transport after the Austin, Texas police responded to noise complaints about his late-night naked bongo-playing; drug charges against him were dropped for lack of a proper warrant.After submerging in a tense struggle to find a German Enigma machine in order to defeat the Nazis in the taut World War II thriller U-571 (2000), McConaughey sweetened things up a bit by co-starring alongside Jennifer Lopez in the romantic comedy The Wedding Planner (2002). A lightweight comedy that did little to further his appeal as an actor of dramatic or comic range, the film nevertheless kept McConaughey in the public eye and once again warmed him to a public unsure how to approach him after numerous rumors of bizarre behavior. McConaughey's performance as a cocky lawyer forced to re-evaluate his quest for happiness after a life-altering experience in 2001's 13 Conversations About One Thing forced critics and audiences to re-evaluate their approach to the eccentric actor, and he would next re-team with U-571 co-star Bill Paxton for the nail-biter sleeper Frailty (2001). In late 2001 and early 2002 the eccentric actor at last received favorable press after coming to the aid of both woman who fainted at the Toronto International Film Festival and a sound man who suffered a seizure during McConaughey's Access Hollywood interview for Reign of Fire (2002), and though the aforementioned film fared only moderately well at the box office, its kindly star seemed to be back in the public's good graces. McConaughey next opted to lighten things up a bit by co-starring alongside Kate Hudson in the romantic comedy How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. In 2005, McConaughey and Al Pacino co-headlined D.J. Caruso's gritty gambling thriller Two for the Money. McConaughey stars as Brandon Lang, a onetime collegiate football hero with a knack for picking winners, who unofficially signs on as the protege - and later the nemesis - of Pacino's seedy high-roller. The film brought in only moderate returns and received mixed reviews from the press, but McConaughey fared substantially better with 2006's romantic comedy Failure to Launch. In the latter, he stars alongside Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker as Tripp, a thirtysomething mama's boy whose parents coax him out of the house by setting him up with dreamgirl Paula (Parker). The film shot up to become the primo box office draw on its opening weekend and did incredible business thereafter. McConaughey would spend the 2000's enjoying leading man status, with memorable roels in We Are Marshall, Fool's Gold, Tropic Thunder, and Magic Mike.

Trivia: Ohio native Eddie McClintock worked as a production assistant on set before pursuing an acting career. He made numerous guest appearances on TV shows like Felicity and Sex and the City throughout the 2000s, most notably taking on recurring roles on Bones, My Boys, and Desperate Housewives. McClintock's big break came in 2009 with a starring role on teh series Warehouse 13.