Blake Lively Biography

Birth Place: Tarzana, CA

Date of Birth / Zodiac Sign: 08/25/1987, Virgo

Height

5' 10" (1.78 m)

Profession: Actor

Synopsis

Blake Lively was born in Los Angeles on August 25, 1987. Her father was an actor and director, and her mother was a talent scout. During her junior year of high school, Lively had an audition for and landed a major role in the 2005 blockbuster "chick flick" The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Two years later, Lively landed her most famous role to date on the CW's hit teen drama Gossip girl.

Early Life

Actress. Blake Lively was born into a Los Angeles show business family on August 25, 1987. Her father, Ernie, was an actor and director, and her mother, Elaine, was a talent scout. Blake Lively is the youngest of five children, and all four of her older siblings are also actors. Before moving to Los Angeles to pursue their show business careers, Lively's parents lived in Georgia, and the household always maintained its Southern influences. "I have a tight-knit Southern family," she says. "So whenever I tell people I'm from L.A., they say, 'Yeah, but you don't count,' I guess because of the Southern values I was raised with, and the way I eat—the more sugary and cheesy and fried, the better."

Lively began the first grade when she was only 3 years old. Her 6-year-old brother was so nervous about beginning first grade alone that her mother told the school that Blake (who was extremely tall for her age) was also 6 years old so that she could accompany him. "After a few weeks," Lively remembers, "they said they would have to put me in mentally disabled classes because I wasn't up to pace with the rest of the kids. They thought that I was slow because all I wanted to do was sleep while the other kids were doing their projects." After getting that early, if perhaps ill-advised, jump on her primary education, Lively attended a staggering 13 different schools by the time she graduated from 12th grade. She finally settled at Burbank High School, where she stood out in both her academics and her extracurricular activities. Besides receiving stellar grades in her AP coursework, Lively was a cheerleader, class president, and member of her school's show choir.

Acting Debut

Despite strong pressure from her older siblings to ditch school and embark on an acting career, Lively initially expressed no interest in acting. Instead, she had her own dreams of attending Stanford University. Nevertheless, sensing her star potential, her older brother Eric relentlessly pushed Blake Lively to try auditioning. "He was trying to get me to make life decisions at 15!" she recalls. He then began contacting agents and telling them about his beautiful, talented younger sister. "I was really busy at school," Lively remembers, "and I would have these agents calling and saying, 'We have an appointment for you.' It was really hard to say no, because I didnt want to make my brother upset."

During her junior year of high school, at the age of 17, Lively finally consented to attend a few auditions. She found nearly instant success. After only a few months of auditioning, she landed a major role in the 2005 blockbuster "chick flick" The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, which filmed during the summer between her junior and senior years at Burbank High. Her performance earned her a Teen Choice Award nomination for Breakout Movie Star.

Gossip Girl Fame

After filming Traveling Pants, Lively returned to Burbank for her senior year and graduated in 2005. After finishing her diploma, she immediately returned to acting, starring opposite Justin Long and Jonah Hill in the 2006 comedy Accepted. A year later, in 2007, Lively landed her most famous role to date on the CW's hit tee- drama Gossip Girl. The show follows a cohort of privileged teenagers on New York's Upper East Side, with Lively playing the lead role of Serena van der Woodsen, a stylish blonde and (somewhat) reformed party girl.

Bolstered by intense media coverage, including a provocative and controversial photo shoot in Rolling Stone magazine, Gossip Girl quickly developed a cult-like fan base. Its young and beautiful cast became nearly ubiquitous on celebrity magazine covers and websites. The fashion-forward show, and Lively's character in particular, also had enormous influence over style trends. Any outfit Lively wears as Serena in an episode of Gossip Girl sells out of stores the day after the episode airs. Gossip Girl is currently in its fourth season, and Lively won the 2008 Teen Choice Award for TV Actress and TV Breakout Star for her performance.

With her dazzling good looks, natural acting talent, and devoted backing from devoted Gossip Girl fans, Lively appears on the verge of breaking out as a top-flight movie star. In a January 2010 profile, Esquire called Lively "the most promising and interesting and talented young actress of the year." In 2010, she displayed a grittier side in her role as a young mother in Ben Affleck's crime thriller The Town. Both the film and Lively's performance drew widespread critical acclaim.

The daughter of longtime screen actor Ernie Lively and the junior member of a showbiz-savvy sibling collective that also includes brothers Jason and Eric and sisters Lori and Robyn, Tarzana, CA native Blake Lively possesses just the kind of wholesome good looks that the Hollywood lens seems to love. Of course, it wouldn't take a psychic to figure out what line of work the cheery and clean-cut blonde would go for, and even after suffering an early career setback at a Mrs. Doubtfire audition gone bad, Lively was still determined to persevere. It was at the tender age of five that young Lively first had her shot at the big time, and though her parents' plan to calm her by telling her that she was only going to be auditioning alongside Robin Williams' twin bizarrely backfired when the aspiring actress was introduced to the real deal, she would later bounce back around the end of the 1990s with a featured performance in the girlish hit The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.