Eliza Patricia Dushku (born December 30, 1980) is an
American television and 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 Judith "Judy"
(née Rasmussen; born March 30,
1942), a university administrator and professor at Suffolk
University, and Philip R. Dushku (born June 1, 1941), an
administrator and teacher in the Boston Public Schools. Dushku's father is Albanian-American and her mother has Danish ancestry.[1] Dushku 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).[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]
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. 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.
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.
She played Eve, the lead character on "Nurses" (also known as Philadelphia General), a
hospital comedy/drama for Fox. This was the second FOX pilot in which she has been cast, but will not be broadcast.[5] 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".
Future roles
On October 1, 2005, she announced at Wizard World Boston that shooting had begun for
Nobel Son in which she will star with Alan
Rickman, Danny DeVito, Bill Pullman, and
Peter Boyle. The movie was released at the 2007
Tribeca Film Festival and received brilliant reviews.[6] Another project is On
Broadway, an independent movie filmed in her native Boston. The movie
is receiving great reviews[7] and a few of them highlight
Eliza's performance. It is currently being shown in many independent film festivals and has already won two awards.
Variety announced on August 2,
2006 that Dushku would co-star with Macaulay Culkin in
Sex and Breakfast, a dark comedy written and directed by Miles Brandman. The
movie will be released in 2008. Dushku will also star in Open Graves, a
horror-thriller movie about a satanic game co-starring Mike Vogel. The movie is expected to
be released in 2007. She will play the main character on a new upcoming thriller
directed by Rob Schmidt who she had previously worked with on Wrong Turn, called The Alphabet Killer. The movie will be
released on October.[8]
She will co-star along Alan Rickman, Bill Pullman,
Chris Pine and Rachel Taylor in Bottle Shock, a drama about the Napa Industry of wine. The movie is directed by Randall Miller, the same director as
Nobel Son.[9] On
August 26, 2007, Eliza signed a development deal with Fox Broadcasting and 20th Century Fox. Under the
pact, the network and the studio will develop projects tailor-made for the actress. They also will approach her with existing
pitches and scripts.[10] Consequently, it is expected that
in a few months Eliza will be starring on a FOX show, whether it already exists
or will still premiere. This deal may subsequently help the signing of distribution deals for her future movies.
Personal life
Dushku lives in the Los Angeles area of Southern California.
Filmography
TV series
References
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
