A well-respected actress, Julia Stiles was born on March 28, 1981, in New York City. Stiles attended New York Quaker prep school, Friends Seminary, as well as New York’s Professional Children's School. She got her start in acting at age eleven, with New York's La MaMa Theatre Company; and in the early 90s, landed her first TV role on popular PBS kids series, Ghostwriter.

Stiles acted in several made-for-TV movies during the late-90s, eventually landing her first lead role in the 1998 flick, Wicked. Stiles’s performance was critically-acclaimed, and she was hailed as "the darling of the Sundance Film Festival" that year. In 1999, Stiles won an MTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Female Performance for her work in 10 Things I Hate About You, alongside Heath Ledger.

Stiles rang in the new millennium with her second starring role, in the critically-maligned Down to You with Freddie Prinze Jr. She followed up by playing Ophelia in the 2000 adaptation of Hamlet, co-starring Ethan Hawke. One year later, Stiles switched from Shakespeare to the streets, playing an aspiring ballerina who moves to an all-black inner city high school in Save the Last Dance. For her performance in the film, Stiles earned MTV awards for Best Kiss and Best Female Performance, as well as a Teen Choice Award for Best Fight Scene.

In 2002, Stiles starred alongside Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity, and later re-visited the role in 2004 for The Bourne Supremacy. In 2003, she joined Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, and Maggie Gyllenhaal in Mona Lisa Smile, playing a marriage-minded Wellesley College student. Stiles is quite the opposite in real life, a self-described feminist, she has written articles for The Guardian on the subject of feminism.

In 2005, Stiles was cast opposite Liev Schreiber in The Omen, a remake of the 1976 horror film of the same name. Stiles later revealed that she was plagued by nightmares during the filming of the movie. Also in 2005, she earned a degree in English from Columbia University, where fellow actress Anna Paquin was also a classmate. Stiles has also branched into writing and directing films, such as the upcoming Raving, starring Zooey Deschanel and Bill Irwin.

In addition to acting, Stiles has also worked on behalf of several charitable organizations, including Habitat for Humanity, for which she built houses in Costa Rica; and Amnesty International. Stiles also serves on the Board of Directors for Amend.org, which administers childhood injury prevention programs throughout Africa.

YUDDY