Who

Despite her recent appearances in a string of mediocre movies, Danes is best known as teen angst icon Angela Chase and for a series of tabloid-worthy romances.

Backstory

Danes grew up in SoHo, the daughter of a photographer and a textile designer, and began studying modern dance at age four. At 9, she told her family that she wanted to act and enrolled at the Professional Performing Arts School; she was a student at Dalton when she got her big break, playing awkward 15-year-old Angela Chase in the short-lived but culturally-influential 1994 ABC drama My So-Called Life. The part won her a Golden Globe in 1995 and served as a springboard for her movie career: She played Juliet to Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo in Baz Luhrmann's weirdo 1996 Shakespeare interpretation, Romeo + Juliet, and starred in a slew of flicks of wildly varying quality (including U Turn and The Rainmaker). Danes went to Yale for a while, but dropped out in 2002 to refocus on acting, and since then she's made appearances in movies like the 2005 adaptation of Steve Martin's novella Shopgirl (which included a love scene with 60-something Martin), Stardust, the heinous The Family Stone, and Evening.

On the side

An accomplished dancer, Danes performed a solo work inspired by Christina Olsen (the crippled woman in Andrew Wyeth's beloved painting) at the East Village's PS 122 in 2005. For an accompanying video, Danes crawled across 10th Street, dragging herself on one hip.

Personal

After dalliances with Stephen Dorff, Matt Damon, and Ben Lee, she "stole" actor Billy Crudup (who is a decade her senior) from his girlfriend, Mary Louise Parker, who was eight months pregnant at the time. Danes and Crudup's relationship hit the skids in December 2006. In 2009, she married Brit actor Hugh Dancy. The couple now lives with their schnauzer/poodle mix, Ouija, in a loft on SoHo's Wooster Street.

Family ties

Her grandfather Gibson Danes, former dean of Yale's School of Art and Architecture, committed suicide with his wife Ilse Gertz in 1992.

True story

Danes was banned from the Philippines in September 1998 after she made derogatory remarks about Manila while filming Brokedown Palace. Danes had commented that the city "just fucking smelled of cockroaches."