Miranda Otto
Born: December 16 1967
Where: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
The actress is probably best known as the Lady Eowyn in the last two instalments of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Other roles have included parts in the thriller What Lies Beneath and Terrence Malick's WWII drama The Thin Red Line.
Otto - a childhood ballerina - made her big screen debut as a teenager in the drama Emma's War with Lee Remick in 1986.
She then gave up medical school to pursue a career in acting and is a graduate of the Australian NIDA theatre school.
She launched her stage career at the Sydney Theatre Company, where she appeared in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.
Roles followed in the Australian thriller Initiation and the horror movie The 13th Floor.
She landed her first starring role opposite Martin Kemp in 1991's The Girl Who Came Too Late and went on to appear in Cold War drama The Nostradamus Kid.
Critically-acclaimed roles followed in Love Serenade (which won the Camera D'Or at Cannes) and The Well, for which she received an Australian Film Institute award nomination.
In 1998, she was cast in The Thin Red Line and followed that with supernatural chiller What Lies Beneath with Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer.
Otto played a scheming Frenchwoman in Charlie Kaufman's Human Nature in 2001 and went on to star in the British thriller Close Your Eyes.
In 2002, she made her first appearance as Eowyn in LOTR: The Two Towers (she took the role after Alison Doody stood down because she was pregnant).
Recent work includes Tom Cruise's estranged wife in War of the Worlds and John Moore's remake of the 1965 classic Flight of the Phoenix with Dennis Quaid.
