Born: 2 July 1986
Where: Cold Spring Harbor, New York, USA
Awards: No major awards yet
Height: 5' 5"
As with all long-running businesses, the selling of films has become ever-more sophisticated over the years. Audiences are now broken down into clear demographics and movies are conceived and pruned to target them. Perhaps the biggest market to have been recognised and tapped by major studios in recent times is the tweenie girl market, females who are still children but moving quickly towards maturity. Naturally, new stars were required to front the films and, predictably, there were many, many applicants. Many applicants but only two clear winners - Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff. Both would score smash hits onscreen, and both would engage in parallel careers in music. But it was Lohan, perhaps because of an already impressively lengthy CV, who'd come out on top. In 2004, Rob Friedman, Vice President of Paramount would say of her "Right now she's the reigning teen queen. Lindsay is identifiable. She's not an unreal personality. Audiences can relate to her". And how. Freaky Friday was a massive hit, she then headlined another in Mean Girls, then shared top billing with the world's most famous VW Beetle in Herbie: Fully Loaded. And she was smart about it, too. Though her stock had risen to the point where she was paid $7.5 million for playing the lead in the light comedy Just My Luck, she also cleverly sought out adult movie-making experience by taking a bit-part as Meryl Streep's daughter in Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion. The reigning teen queen was clearly preparing herself for the long haul.She was born Lindsay Morgan Lohan on the 2nd of July, 1986, in Cold Spring Harbour, Long Island, New York. This place was a fair reflection of her Irish-Italian Catholic family's fortunes at this point. A former whaling village, it had been popularised in the early 1900s by well-to-do New Yorkers like Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the founder of Tiffany's, who founded estates there. As time passed the area became famed for its bird sanctuary, the Muttontown Preserve woodlands and then a genetic and cancer research centre that spawned three Nobel Prize winners. Though just a few miles outside the New York conurbation, it was leafy, sparsely populated and rich. Come the year 2000 its population was still 91.3% white with a median income of over $200,000. It was Gatsby country.So, the Lohans were doing well. Lindsay's father Michael was a Wall Street trader who'd helped build his father's pasta business into a multi-million dollar enterprise (he'd later sell it off to finance a move into film production). Lindsay's mother Dina (nee Sullivan), meanwhile, brought an element of showbiz to the home, being a former TV actress and a member of the exclusive Radio City Rockettes dance troupe. Originally inspired by the Tiller girls in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1922, the Rockettes had become the world's top precision dance group and a major US icon. Having grown in numbers over the years to cope with a 4-shows-a-day 365-days-a-year schedule there were still only 36 Rockettes at any one time. Only the absolute best need apply.
Michael and Dina were both Long Island kids, but from the opposite side of the island. He came from Laurel Hill on the north shore, she from Merrick on the south. They'd marry in 1985. Lindsay was the eldest of four children, brother Michael being born a year later, then sister Aliana in 1994 and a second brother, Dakota, in 1996.With such a showbiz and money-making background, it should come as no surprise that the Lohans were quick to make use of their first child's precocious nature and red-haired and freckled good looks. Actually the first red-head to be signed by the Ford Modeling Agency, from the age of three she was appearing in TV and print ads, working for Abercrombie and Fitch, Gap, Pizza Hut, Wendy's, Jell-O (with Bill Cosby) and Calvin Klein. Taking dancing and singing lessons from the age of four, she boosted her employment possibilities even further, eventually scoring over 60 commercials. And she loved it. Her mother's glamorous past saw little Lindsay idolising the likes of Ann-Margret (who'd toured with the Rockettes) and Marilyn Monroe while also being impressed by the absurd maturity of the young Jodie Foster. It was no wonder that she felt her mother's influence more strongly that her father's as, in 1990, he was given a 4-year sentence in federal prison for fraudulent trading in commodities futures (he claimed he was just a fall guy). It would not be the last time Lindsay would suffer due to her father's behaviour.Having at age 7 appeared on The David Letterman Show as a piece of garbage in a sketch called Things You Find On The Floor Of The D-Train, it was inevitable that the ambitious Lindsay would gravitate towards acting and, at the age of 10 she scored a part on Another World, America's second-longest-running soap, concerning the lives and trials of the folk of Bay City. Many household had made a start here, including Morgan Freeman, Ray Liotta and Anne Heche, and Lindsay was taken on as Alexandra Fowler, conceived in sin by show favourites Amanda Corry and Sam Fowler and now having to cope with her mother's tempestuous love life. Lohan would be her character's third incarnation, following on from child actresses Kerri Ann Darling and Hillary Scott. It was a peachy job with more dialogue than a 10-year-old would normally be trusted with, but Lindsay had to leave when an even peachier opportunity came her way. For the past six months Disney had been seeking a young actress to star in a remake of their own 1961 classic The Parent Trap, wherein Hayley Mills had cunningly manipulated a reunion of her warring parents. Come January of 1997, director Nancy Meyers finally chose Lindsay so, for the next eight months, she flitted between London and California's Napa Valley, playing the separated twins who meet at summer camp and plot to bring parents Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson back together. And she did a quite extraordinary job, not simply mastering a Brit accent but also the faltering accents of Brit and American kids trying to mimic each other. One review described her as "frighteningly poised", she won a Young Artist award and it was clear that Lohan was something special. Disney certainly thought so (they'd have appreciated the $66 million US box office gross, too), signing her to a three-picture deal and offering her the adolescent lead as Penny in their forthcoming Inspector Gadget. Having spent so long away from home, though, she turned it down, the role being taken by Michelle Trachtenberg.$PAGE$
Lohan would now return to her school career, attending Cold Spring Harbour Junior and Senior High Schools where she would be a Straight-A student, excelling in science and maths, as well as sporting activities. Later, as her acting career gained pace, she'd spend a few months at Sanford H Calhoun High School in her mother's home town of Merrick. She'd also receive home tuition from the Laurel Springs School (as had Elijah Wood).After a self-imposed 2-year hiatus, Lindsay would begin to fulfil her obligations to Disney with Life-Size, a movie made specifically for Disney's TV channel. Here her mother dies and her father deals with his grief by becoming a workaholic. Lohan, meanwhile, is more adventurous, using magic spells in an effort to resurrect her mum. Unfortunately she only succeeds in giving life to a doll (Tyra Banks) who enjoys her new life so much she foils all of a horrified Lohan's attempts to turn her back. Eventually, of course, everyone learns to get along, Banks becomes the friend Lindsay needs and daddy recognises his daughters pain. It was another fine role for a youngster, demanding far more than simple cuteness.Life-Size was first shown in 2000, the same year as Lindsay won another, potentially fabulous, role. This was as Bette Midler's daughter in the new sitcom Bette, where Midler would play a successful singer and actress struggling to stay at the top - herself, basically. The pilot would see Midler panicked into embarrassing attempts at rejuvenation when Danny De Vito mentions that he'd like her to play his mother, with Lohan (here named Rose after Midler's biggest hit), popping up to exhibit teenage excruciation at her mum's antics. And it was a success, a series being greenlighted. However, the producers decided that as most of the crew were LA residents the show should be filmed there, rather than New York, where the pilot was made. This was no good for Lohan and she dropped out, being replaced by Marina Malota. As it turned out it was no good for New York-based Bette Midler either. She was Golden Globe-nominated but after just 17 episodes the travel and pressure made her job too tough and the show was scuppered. In the meantime, Lindsay, also an aspiring musician, had signed a 5-album deal with Estefan Enterprises, run by Emilio Estefan, husband of the multi-million-selling Gloria. The idea was to groom Lindsay into a pop-rock starlet of the Avril Lavigne type, to be sold on to a major label.Continuing with Disney, Lohan would now make Get A Clue, another production to premiere on the Disney Channel. In the spirit of Harriet The Spy (a hit for Lindsay's Inspector Gadget replacement Michelle Trachtenberg), this saw her as a wealthy New York student with a flair for fashion and journalism who, when her teacher Ian Gomez goes missing, outwits all the adults while seeking the truth behind the disappearance. It was fairly typical Disney fare, complete with flashy editing and kid-pleasing music, but it was another step towards Teen Queendom.
If Get A Clue was a step, Lohan's next effort was a giant stride. This saw her jump into the shoes of her former idol Jodie Foster as she starred in another Disney remake, this time the perennial favourite Freaky Friday, originally a hit back in 1976. Here Jamie Lee Curtis would play a widowed psychiatrist about to marry Mark Harmon, much to the chagrin of daughter Lindsay, a clean-cut punk and garage guitarist. After a big fight in a Chinese restaurant, mother and child are zapped by a fortune cookie curse and wake the next day to find themselves trapped in each other's body. The girl would make serious efforts to subvert her mother's life, getting her ears pierced, cutting her hair and getting it on with a motorcycle boy (Curtis having great fun with the role) while mum's desperately trying to cope in the bizarre and profoundly unfair world of High School (Lohan making fine use of the innate seriousness she shares with Jodie Foster). It was a screaming success, breaking the $100 million mark with ease and, boosted by Lohan's own song Ultimate, its soundtrack entered the Billboard Top 20.Lohan was now officially a hot property. Moving to LA she shared a Sunset Boulevard apartment with Raven-Symone, another child star who'd broken through on the Cosby Show and her own TV vehicle That's So Raven (the pair had met at a Vanity Fair photo shoot featuring the cream of upcoming actresses). She'd also buy a BMW and start stepping out, dating pop star Aaron Carter, the younger brother of Backstreet Boy Nick, and gaining a reputation for fast living that was not helped by her friendship with the likes of Paris Hilton.