Rachel Bilson
Born: August 25 1981
Where: Los Angeles, California, USA
The onetime wild child is best known for her starring role as Millie opposite Hayden Christiansen in the sci-fi thriller Jumper.
Earlier appearances included director Zach Braff's rom-com The Last Kiss and the American TV's Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
The daughter of a writer/director/producer father and a sex therapist mother, Bilson hailed from a show business family.
Her great-grandfather George Bilson was head of the trailer department at RKO Pictures while her great-grandmother was a screenwriter. He grandfather, Bruce Bilson, is a film director.
Bilson's parents divorced during her childhood and, in 1997, her father remarried Heather Medway, an actress and the mother of Bilson's half-sister Hattie.
She is infamous for having a "self-destructive, rebellious period" during which she was involved in a head-on collision with another car when she was just 13.
Bilson was unconscious for a few days, suffered a scar above her right eye and sometimes suffers migraines and memory loss.
Straighening herself out, she graduated from Walter Reed Middle School in 1996 and subsequently attended Notre Dame High School, where she appeared in productions of Bye Bye Birdie, Once Upon a Mattress and The Crucible.
(she also appeared on stage with schoolmate Katharine McPhee, who would later be a finalist on American Idol).
Bilson attended Grossmont College in San Diego but dropped out after one year, taking her father's advice to pursue a professional acting career.
She landed appearances in commercials, including advertisements for Raisin Bran and Pepto-Bismol and made her screen acting debut in early 2003, appearing in episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter and in the short Unbroken.
Bilson was subsequently cast as the recurring character Summer Roberts in The O.C. (she enjoyed a brief relationship with co-star Adam Brody).
Bilson's first film role was as a college seductress in The Last Kiss, a romantic comedy-drama also starring Zach Braff and Jacinda Barrett.
In 2006, Bilson was cast in the role of Millie in Doug Liman's thriller Jumper, as the replacement for actress Teresa Palmer.
