Amanda Peet

Actor

Amanda Peet is a brilliantly blue-eyed actress who rose to fame with a five-year string of TV and movie roles beginning in 1996. These included TV guest turns on Law & Order and Seinfeld (as Linette, a high-maintenance girlfriend for Jerry) and a starring role in the romantic sitcom Jack & Jill (1999-2001). Her special blend of goofy, cockeyed sex appeal was on prominent display in the comedy The Whole Nine Yards (2000, as a love interest for Bruce Willis), and she also appeared in films including She's the One (1996, with Jennifer Aniston), Grind (1997), and Simply Irresistible (1999). She's worked steadily since then, with appearances on the TV series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and in films including the sequel The Whole Ten Yards (2004), A Lot Like Love (2005), Syriana (2005, with George Clooney) and The X Files: I Want to Believe (2008). She has also dabbled in the New York stage scene: off-Broadway, in Awake and Sing! and This is How it Goes; and in a 2006 Broadway revival of Barefoot in the Park.

Extra credit: She married screenwriter and novelist David Benioff in 2006. Their daughter, Frances Pen Benioff, whom they call Frankie, was born in 2007... Peet was raised primarily in New York City, where she went to high school at Friends Seminary, graduated from Columbia University with a history degree in 1994, and studied with famous acting teacher Uta Hagen... Her parents are Manhattan lawyer Charles D. Peet Jr. and social worker Penny Peet (nee Levy)... In 2008, she drew the ire of child-vaccination opponents when she endorsed a pro-vaccination campaign sponsored by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Other New York-born actresses with Columbia degrees include Maggie Gyllenhaal and Julia Stiles.