Rachael Leigh Cook Biography

Name : Rachael Leigh Cook

Nickname : The Indie Queen, Cook

Date of Birth : 4 October 1979, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Height : 5' 2" (1.57 m)

Occupation : Actress

Born on Oct. 4, 1979 in Minneapolis, MN into a solid middle class family, Cook began modeling at age 10 for Target and Milk-Bone dog biscuits campaigns. While attending Minneapolis South High School, the ambitious teen began auditioning for acting roles, making her film debut in the short, "26 Summer Street" (1994) and gaining national notoriety for a memorable public service announcement for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, which produced the famous This Is Your Brain on Drugs ads. In her PSA.

Cook bypassed the wannabe stage and nailed her first audition (for the part of a budding entrepreneur in The Baby-Sitters Club (1995)). She returned to theaters three months later in the Jonathan Taylor Thomas vehicle Tom and Huck (1995), then filled her calendar with appearances in independent and made-for-TV movies. She divided her time between Minneapolis and Tinseltown, shuttling from school events to movie shoots with her mother in tow. Cook's starlet status crystallized in 1999, when she starred opposite Freddie Prinze Jr. in the Pygmalion retelling She's All That (1999). Her on-screen transformation from ugly duckling to ravishing beauty scored several teen-oriented awards and made Cook a hot commodity in Hollywood. She signed for a handful of plum follow-up roles, including a troubled adolescent in Sylvester Stallone's Get Carter (2000), a frontier gal in Texas Rangers (2001), and the caterwauling lead in the live-action version of Josie and the Pussycats (2001). Cook now lives primarily in Los Angeles, but she returns home frequently to visit with friends and family. Her father, Tom (a former stand-up comic), is a social worker in the public school system, and her younger brother, Ben, is an aspiring filmmaker.