Neve Campbell

Born: 3rd October, 1973
Where: Ontario, Canada

The trained dancer made her big screen breakthrough with the hit slasher spoof series Scream!.

The daughter of a Scottish father and a Dutch AIDs counsellor mother, she joined the National Ballet School of Canada aged nine.

(at 14 she suffered a "nervous breakdown" which resulted in complete hairloss which a course of intensive acupuncture helped grow back).

As a dancer, she made her debut in the Toronto production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera.

Campbell made her film debut in 1994 with the direct-to-video The Dark, before finding success in a supporting role as a teenager dabbling in witchery in The Craft.

However, it was on TV as Julia Holbrook in the series Party of Five that she first started receiving attention.

She achieved her breakthrough in 1996, as the heroine Sidney Prescott in the post-modern box-office smash Scream.

Scream, directed by Wes Craven, parodied the 'slasher' films of the early 80s and spawned the inevitable sequel Scream 2, with Campbell's character now a college student.

She was hailed as Best Actress at the Saturn Awards for her work in Scream and received both a Blockbuster Award and MTV Movie Award for Best Actress for the sequel.

Attempting to distance herself from the horror genre, Campbell was miscast in the role of a former prison inmate in the uneven Wild Things.

She floundered further as a soap actress enjoying the nightlife in 54 but was on firmer ground in the comedy thriller Panic with William H Macy.

In 2003, she starred in the Robert Altman ballet ensemble drama Company and played a young Queen Elizabeth in the British comedy Churchill: The Hollywood Years.