Who

One of the most famous waifs in recent memory, Flockhart is best known for playing the underfed title character on madcap lawyer dramedy Ally McBeal, and for her longtime relationship with aged hunk Harrison Ford.

Backstory

Flockhart grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of a Kraft foods executive, and graduated from Rutgers before moving to New York in the late '80s to pursue acting. She worked as an aerobics instructor between auditions to pay the bills and in 1989 landed her first role, on the soap Guiding Light. A TV movie followed—it was about bulimia, of all things—and she made her Broadway debut in the 1994 revival of The Glass Menagerie.

Flockhart was coming off of several solid movie roles, including 1996's The Birdcage with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane, when David E. Kelley picked her as the title character in Ally McBeal in 1997; she played the whimsical, romance-obsessed lawyer for five years before the show went off the air in 2002. Flockhart largely dropped off the map post-McBeal, right around the time she settled down with Harrison Ford, appearing in a couple of little-watched indie flicks and suffering a number of notable near-misses. (She was up for the role of Susan Mayer on Desperate Housewives, but ended up losing out to Teri Hatcher.) She bounced back in 2006 when she was cast in Jon Robin Baitz's ABC series Brothers and Sisters, in which she stars as a neurotic Republican senatorial aide alongside Sally Field, Rachel Griffiths, and Rob Lowe.

The look

In her Ally days, Flockhart attracted as much attention for her skeletal frame and protruding clavicle as for her acting, even as she vehemently denied having an eating disorder: She told David Letterman that those who didn't believe she was merely small-boned could "kiss my skinny white ass." In 2006, Flockhart finally ate something—crow, served chilled—admitting that she had indeed been anorexic during the McBeal years.

Personal

Flockhart was linked to Sam Mendes, Jeffrey Kramer, and Gary Shandling before getting together with Harrison Ford, who's more than two decades her senior, in 2002. (Although wedding rumors have frequently swirled, they remain unmarried.) The couple divides their time between a loft in Chelsea, a ranch in Jackson Hole, and a home in LA. In 2001, Flockhart adopted a son, Liam, to whom Ford is stepdaddy.