Jump to content

Eliza Dushku

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 72.11.8.238 (talk) at 18:54, 24 August 2007 (→Later roles). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Eliza Dushku
Born
Eliza Patricia Dushku
Height5 ft 5 in (1. 65m)

Eliza Patricia Dushku (born December 30, 1980) is an American film actress, who has appeared in several Hollywood movies such as True Lies, The New Guy, Bring It On, and Wrong Turn. She is also well known for her acting on television, such as her recurring appearances on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel as Faith, as well as the main character in the series Tru Calling.

Biography

Early life

Dushku was born in Watertown, Massachusetts to Philip R. Dushku (born June 1, 1941), an Albanian-American administrator-teacher in the Boston Public Schools and Judith (Judy) Rasmussen (born March 30, 1942) (a half-Danish-American university administrator and professor at Suffolk University); She graduated from Watertown High School (Massachusetts) as a teenager. She was raised a Mormon, the faith of her mother (though she is not actively practicing).[1][2] She has three older brothers, Aaron, Benjamin (Ben) (born February 5, 1976), and Nathan (Nate) (born June 8, 1977, in Boston, Massachusetts), the last of whom is also an actor and a model. Her parents divorced when she was still an infant.[3]

File:Dushku 2.JPG
A young Dushku appears in the 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger film, True Lies

As a teenager Dushku attended Beaver Country Day School and Watertown High School.

Early career

Dushku came to the attention of casting agents when she was 10. She was chosen at the end of a five month search throughout the United States for the lead role of Alice, opposite Juliette Lewis in the film That Night. In 1993, Dushku landed a role as Pearl alongside Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in This Boy's Life, a role that she said opened a lot of doors. Dushku says that DiCaprio taught her how to deal with bullies and other high school dangers, for which she is grateful.[citation needed]

The following year, she played the teenage daughter of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies. She also had parts as Paul Reiser's daughter in Bye Bye, Love, as Cindy Johnson with Halle Berry and Jim Belushi in Race the Sun, as well as roles in a television movie and a short film.

Dushku took some time off from acting to finish her junior and senior years of high school. She was accepted to the George Washington University in Washington, DC and Suffolk University in Boston, where her mother serves as professor of government and previously served as dean of the campus in Dakar, Senegal.

Later roles

After completing high school, Dushku returned to acting with the role of Faith, a Slayer much more troubled than the main character Buffy. Though initially planned as a five episode role, the character became so popular that she stayed on for the entirety of the third season and returned for a two-part appearance in season four, after which the remainder of her original story arc was played out as part of the first season of the Buffy spinoff series Angel. Repentant and rededicated, Faith returned as a heroine in a number of further episodes of Angel and in the last five episodes of Buffy.

Because of her convincing portrayal of a sociopath, she became an icon to many criminals. She was inundated with piles of fan mail from legions of prisoners. She said that:

I've been getting fan mail from maximum security penitentiaries and death row. What are the authorities thinking of in playing a show with young teenage girls to Death Row inmates? They write everything — disgusting things that you don't even want to know about. And they send me pictures — 'Oh, here's a picture of me before I was incarcerated!' — and there's some guy sat on the sofa with a bottle of beer and a moustache, and a big gut. It's so creepy. Way more creepy than Buffy.[4]

In 2000, Dushku starred in Soul Survivors, reuniting her with Race The Sun co-star Casey Affleck. She followed that up with the cheerleader comedy Bring It On with Kirsten Dunst, which was a surprising success at the box office that spawned straight-to-DVD sequels. 2001 saw a busy time for her: shooting The New Guy in Texas and having to shuttle up to New York where she was reunited with actor Robert De Niro and director Michael Caton-Jones in City by the Sea. She played James Franco's junkie girlfriend and mother of his child. The film garnered attention from a wider adult audience and several good reviews.

The same year Kevin Smith invited Dushku to be a part of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, where Dushku co-starred with Shannon Elizabeth, Ali Larter, Ben Affleck, and others.

In 2001 Eliza Dushku was considered for the role of Paige Matthews on the WB hit Series Charmed but actress Rose McGowan was given the role. [citation needed]

2003 saw the release of Wrong Turn, a horror film in which Dushku had the starring role, and The Kiss, an independent comedy-drama. Starting that same year, she also starred in a new Fox TV series, Tru Calling, where she played the main character, Tru Davies, a medical student whose grant is pulled out from under her, forcing her to take a job at a local morgue where she discovers that she has the power to "re-live" the previous day over again, an ability she used to right wrongful deaths.

She has had many roles as a "bad girl" in movies and relishes the opportunities. In an interview with Maxim magazine in May of 2001, Eliza says of her roles, "It’s easy to play a bad girl: You just do everything you’ve been told not to do, and you don’t have to deal with the consequences, because it’s only acting."[2]

Dushku starred in an off-Broadway production entitled Dog Sees God from December 2005, playing "Van's sister", a character paralleled with Lucy from original Peanuts comic strip that the play production is based on. She quit in February 2006 along with several other members of the cast amongst rumours of alleged abuse from the producer, which were later dismissed.

Dushku voiced the role of Yumi Sawamura in the English language version of the PlayStation 2 video game Yakuza, published and developed by SEGA, and released in September 2006.

She appeared in the Simple Plan music video, "I'm Just a Kid", as the band's love interest, as well as Nickelback's video for "Rockstar".

Personal life

She is currently dating Los Angeles Dodgers All-Star starting pitcher, Brad Penny.[6] Dushku lives in the Los Angeles area.

Dushku is a Democrat, and according to The New York Times, visited Columbus, Ohio during the 2004 presidential campaign and took part in a phone bank to help the campaign of Sen. John Kerry.[citation needed]

Filmography

TV Series

References

  1. ^ Q&A - Eliza Dushku
  2. ^ a b Paul Young (2001). "Faith No More". Maxim Online. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  3. ^ "Eliza Dushku Interview-The New Guy". about.com. Retrieved 2007-03-03. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  4. ^ http://news.eliza-dushku.com/archives0102/na050101.html
  5. ^ "Dushku joins Fox's 'Nurses'". Variety. 2007-03-11. Retrieved 2007-03-20. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  6. ^ Ben Widdicombe's gossip column in the New York Daily News, 18 January 2007
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Eliza Dushku.


Template:Persondata

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eliza_Dushku&oldid=153401285"