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| Kristen Anne Bell (born July 18, 1980) is an American actress who currently stars in the U.S. television show Veronica Mars. Bell was born in Detroit, Michigan to a Polish American family.[1] She was raised in suburban Huntington Woods. She went to her first audition at age 11 and won a dual role as a banana and a tree in a suburban Detroit theater's production of Raggedy Ann and Andy. She attended Royal Oak Shrine Catholic High School in nearby Royal Oak, where she took the starring role in the school's 1997 production of The Wizard of Oz as Dorothy Gale. She also appeared in Fiddler on the Roof (1995), Lady Be Good (1996), and Li'l Abner (1998). In 1998, the year of her graduation, she appeared in Polish Wedding, a movie that was being filmed locally. She was named the yearbook's "Best Looking Girl" by senior class vote. Kristen Bell left NYU when she took a key role as Becky Thatcher in the short-lived Broadway musical of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 2001. That same year she officially made her credited film debut in Pootie Tang, though her appearance in that film exists only in the credit sequence. In 2002, she appeared in the Broadway revival of The Crucible. Bell then appeared in a handful of television shows as a special guest before landing a role in the Hallmark movie The King and Queen of Moonlight Bay in 2003. A year later, she appeared in the television movie Gracie's Choice. In 2004, Bell made her big-screen debut, appearing in David Mamet's Spartan as Laura Newton, the President's kidnapped daughter, acting alongside Val Kilmer. Following this, Bell's career continued to progress as she won the role of the title character in UPN's drama Veronica Mars, which was launched in the fall of 2004. The show has earned positive reviews from television critics, as has Bell's performance, which some critics have mentioned as potentially worthy of an Emmy nod. The show is now in its second season. Bell has also guest-starred on HBO's drama Deadwood in a two episode story-arc. Bell appears as Gracie in Fifty Pills, a Tribeca Film Festival entry which premiered in April 2006, and continues to star in Veronica Mars. She is currently filming Fanboys, also to be released in 2006. She now lives in Los Angeles and has made several appearances on popular late-night television shows. A film version of her off-Broadway musical Reefer Madness (a spoof of the 1938 exploitation film of the same name, which was in turn based on an anti-marijuana propaganda film entitled Tell Your Children) debuted on the Showtime network in April 2005, with Bell reprising the role which she played in the musical. She appeared in a short independent film called The Receipt. She also has the film Roman and the horror film Pulse both scheduled for release in 2006, the latter of which is an American remake of the Japanese horror film Kairo. Bell, a vegetarian, was named by Jane magazine in the U.S.A. as one of the "eleven people you'd most like to see naked." She posed for the magazine's July 2005 issue. She also was named #68 on the Maxim magazine "Hot 100 of 2005" list and was the Maxim cover feature for March 2006. |
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