Kristin Davis Biography

NAME: Kristin Landen Davis

OCCUPATION: Film Actress, Television Actress

BIRTH DATE: c. February 24, 1965

EDUCATION: A.C.Flora High School, Rutgers University

PLACE OF BIRTH: Boulder, Colorado

Actress. Kristin Landen Davis was born on February 23 or 24 (depending on the source), 1965, in Boulder, Colorado, Her parents divorced when she was a baby.

Kristin Lee Davis is an only child, and as her parents divorced when she was a baby, she was subsequently adopted by her stepfather in 1968 when he married her mother. She and her parents moved to Columbia, South Carolina when she was a child and her stepfather served as a psychology professor and the provost at the University of South Carolina. Davis lived in South Carolina and graduated from A.C. Flora High School there in 1983. She then moved to New Jersey where she went to Rutgers University.

Kristin had wanted to be an actress since she was 10 years old, and was cast in a community theatre production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but only really broke into professional acting after her 1987 graduation from university, when she moved to New York. She then spent eight years as a waitress and running a yoga studio with a friend in New York City before landing a 1995 role on Melrose Place as Brooke Armstrong Campbell. She was only on the show for one year, however, as the producers discovered that the viewers were not warming to her character. She also had small roles in television shows such as Friends and Seinfeld.

In 1998 Davis was cast as Charlotte York in Sex and the City, which has been her most famous role to date and propelled her to bona fide stardom. She remained in the cast until 2004, when the show ended, and stars in the 2008 Sex and the City Movie. Kristin was shot to fame not only by the overall success of the show, but by the niche that she both created and filled in the character of Charlotte: a preppy, elegant Upper East Side art dealer with a classic, conservative and chic fashion sense. Davis would become one of the four faces that epitomised the simultaneous glamour and realism of all thirty-something women.

Kristin’s film career was never as prolific as her television success, until the Sex and the City Movie in 2008. Before that, she starred in a string of mediocre family movies, including Deck The Halls in 2006, a Christmas movie also starring Danny DeVito and the husband of her co-star Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick. Other films include The Shaggy Dog (2006) and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D (2005), both of which only enjoyed lukewarm success.

Kristin Davis was prim and proper (and some have said prissy) Charlotte York on HBO's Sex and the City and the subsequent movie (2008). But before this career-making role, some of you may have seen her portrayal of uber-bitch Brooke Armstrong Campbell on Melrose Place (come on, don't deny that you were a fan...).

None of this, however, could top the excitement generated by the announcement that Davis and her "Sex and the City" co-stars would reunite (after numerous delays) for the film version of the hit show in 2008. That same year, Davis' image - or rather, her image as Charlotte - took an unsavory hit after photos alleging to show her in sexually explicit acts were released on the Internet. Davis's swiftly denied her participation. Ironically, Davis, who played the commitment-obsessed Charlotte, was the only one of her three "Sex" co-stars to remain steadfastly single during and after the show's run. In prior years, however, she was linked to such high-profile suitors as Alec Baldwin, Jeff Goldblum and Steve Martin. In a rare move, Davis branched out from her post-"Sex" role selection of softer fare to play Jon Favreau's disillusioned wife in the raunchy Vince Vaughn comedy "Couples Retreat" (2009), which was successful at the box office but not so much with critics. Davis returned to surer ground in the global smash "Sex and the City 2" (2010), where she plumbed the continued growth of Charlotte, arguably the character who had traveled the greatest emotional distance throughout the years.