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Cameron Michelle Diaz (born August 30, 1972) is an American actress and former fashion model. She is perhaps best known for her roles in popular blockbuster movies such as The Mask, There's Something About Mary, My Best Friend's Wedding, Charlie's Angels, Shrek, and Gangs of New York. She was the second of three actresses to join the "$20 Million Club" after receiving this salary for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. While her teen contemporaries were struggling with mundane things like school and dating, Southern California native Cameron Diaz was employed by the Elite Modeling agency appearing on magazine covers and in campaigns for clients like Calvin Klein and Levi's. And just like many women in the modeling industry, she harbored dreams of an acting career. Diaz, of Cuban and Native American descent, burst onto the big screen as the torch-singing moll in 1994's Jim Carrey blockbuster "The Mask". Perhaps ironically, she had set her sights lower, auditioning for the supporting part of a reporter (played in the film by Amy Yasbeck), but after some dozen callbacks, she was hired. In spite of, or perhaps because of, her lack of formal training, the now blonde Diaz managed to hold her own against the often over-the-top antics of co-star Carrey. Roger Ebert writing in his review in the Chicago Sun-Times (July 29, 1994) called her "a true discovery in the film, a genuine sex bomb with a gorgeous face, a wonderful smile, and a gift of comic timing," and correctly predicted that while it was her first film role, it would surely not be her last. Diaz was born in San Diego, California, the daughter of Billie (née Early), an import-export agent, and Emilio Diaz, an oil company foreman. Diaz's father is a second-generation Cuban-American and her mother is of English, German and Cherokee Native American ancestry. Diaz attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School at the same time as rapper Snoop Dogg. At 16 she began her career as a fashion model. Diaz signed with top modeling agency Elite Model Management. After graduating from high school, she went to work in Japan and met video director Carlo de la Torre. On her return to America, she moved in with him. For the next few years, her modeling took her around the world, working for contracts with major companies. She modelled for designers such as Calvin Klein and Levi's. She also graced the cover of the July 1990 issue of Seventeen magazine. During this period she also made a brief but now notorious soft pornographic film, She's no Angel. Riding the buzz on her performance in "The Mask", At 21, Diaz auditioned for The Mask. Even though she had no previous acting experience, she obtained the role of the female lead. She signed up for acting lessons right after getting the part. Over the next three years, she won roles in low-budget, independent films, such as The Last Supper, Feeling Minnesota, and She's the One. She then regained mainstream success with her roles in My Best Friend's Wedding and There's Something About Mary. She won critical acclaim for her performance in Being John Malkovich, which earned her Best Supporting Actress nominations at the Golden Globes, the BAFTA Awards and the SAG Awards. Diaz was courted by virtually every producer scrambling to cast "this year's blonde". In a series of shrewd moves, she opted to take roles in low-budget films which stretched her acting abilities. Diaz joined a cast of other rising players (including Courtney B. Vance, Ron Eldard and Annabeth Gish) as liberal college students who invite right-wingers to "The Last Supper" (1995) before tackling the role of a confused bride-to-be who finds herself attracted to her brother-in-law in "Feeling Minnesota" (1996). Willing to portray less than likable women, she deftly essayed a former hooker now a Wall Street shark in Edward Burns' comedy "She's the One" (also 1996). Although she stumbled as a spoiled rich girl who conspires with her kidnapper in Danny Boyle's uneven "A Life Less Ordinary" (1997), that same year found her playing Dermot Mulroney's fiancée who encounters a rival in Julia Roberts in the fluffy but enjoyable "My Best Friend's Wedding". While most of the attention originally focused on Roberts' return to lighter fare, the spotlight shifted to Diaz's scene-stealing turn as the seemingly ditsy bride-to-be. Having proven her comedic abilities as a supporting player, Diaz graduated to star in one of 1998's highest grossing (in both senses of the word) feature, the Farrelly brothers' "There's Something About Mary". As Ben Stiller's dream girl, she is eternally optimistic and a paragon of beauty. Yet she is also a fine comedic performer, especially in bizarre or outrageous situations (like the now famous "hair gel" scene), in part, as Charles Taylor pointed out in the July 18, 1998 issue of Salon, because of "the crazed gleam that sneaks into her eyes, her big toothy smile and the manic trill you can sometimes hear in her voice." In a surprise move, the New York Film Critics voted her their Best Actress award. During the 1999-2000 period, Diaz starred in many films, such as Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, A Life Less Ordinary, Any Given Sunday, and the hit adaptation of Charlie's Angels. In 2001, she won nominations for Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes, the SAG Awards and the AFI Awards for Vanilla Sky, and also voiced Princess Fiona in Shrek, for which she earned $10 million. Although virtually wasted in a cameo as a TV reporter in Terry Gilliam's attempt to capture the oddball universe of Hunter S. Thompson in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", Diaz delved into the dark side, downplaying her usually bubbly screen persona to play yet another bride-to-be in Peter Berg's black comedy "Very Bad Things" (both 1998). Here, she essayed a manipulative, cunning almost psychopathic woman determined at all costs to march down the aisle. (The writer-director envisioned the character as "a young Martha Stewart with a bad case of rabies.") Alternately seductive and bullying to her intended (Jon Favreau), she crafted a comic creation that bordered on the grotesque, yet through her skills managed to make her understandable. In 1999's inventive, if not wholly satisfying "Being John Malkovich", Diaz adopted a dowdy look and mane of frizzy brown hair as Lotte Schwartz, the pet store employee wife of a puppeteer (John Cusack). When her husband discovers a mysterious portal that allows anyone to spend 15 minutes inside the mind and body of the titular actor, she has an epiphany, experiencing a connection to her husband's brittle co-worker (Catherine Keener) that transcends sex and spins off into a complicated and surprising adventure. Once again, Diaz built a funny persona out of seemingly contradictory parts and proved her versatility. In 2003, Diaz received another Golden Globe nomination for Martin Scorsese's epic Gangs of New York, and became the second actress (after Wedding costar Julia Roberts) to earn $20 million for a role, receiving the sum for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. After Full Throttle, Diaz only appeared in three films, Shrek 2, In Her Shoes and The Holiday. Adopting a more serious pose, she rounded out the millennium as the ambitious new owner of a struggling football franchise in Oliver Stone's "Any Given Sunday", proving with this hard-line role that her talents had more facets yet to be tapped. She continued to stretch, successfully undertaking challenging roles in the female ensemble of "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her" (screened at Sundance in 2000; aired on Showtime in 2001) and in the drama "Invisible Circus" (2000). Teaming with Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu as "Charlie's Angels" (also 2000) in the unqualified hit offered her an opportunity to show her lighter side with a disarming turn, as well as convincingly kick butt as a pseudo action hero. And she won a legion of youthful admirers with his turn as Princess Fiona in the charming CGI tale "Shrek" (2001) and its sequel "Shrek 2" (2004). Diaz shifted gears entirely for the next release, Scorsese's long-awaited drama "Gangs of New York" (2002), in which she played the comely street pickpocket Jenny Everdeane, the love interest of Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio). The film was certainly admirable—and singled out for many accolades—but also frequently missed the mark; Diaz's performance was one of the film's more satisfying elements, however. The following year, Diaz returned to form as the ass-kicking girl-next-door when she returned for the blockbuster comedy hit sequel "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" (2003). The sequel reunited Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu—now famously linked as best friends, sort of a mod chick Rat Pack—as the indomitable crime-fighting heroines. During 2004 and early 2005, Diaz explored some of the planet's environmentally unique locations while discovering ways to help preserve them for the 10-episode MTV series Trippin' which featured numerous celebrities and friends of Diaz, such as Jessica Alba, Drew Barrymore, Mark Hoppus, Eva Mendes and Justin Timberlake. In between film roles, the actress (who made news for her romance with the younger pop star Justin Timberlake) starred in "Trippin'" (2005), a 10-episode travel series for MTV in which the actress and fellow celebrities visited exotic locales and enjoyed unusual activities, riding elephants in Nepal, sand-boarding in Chile and testing the hot springs in Yellowstone. Diaz returned center stage in director Curtis Hanson's dramedy "In Her Shoes" (2005), which cast the actress and co-star Toni Collette as tight-knit but polar opposite sisters Diaz played the reckless, sexy party girl, Collette the responsible attorney with low self-esteem who have a calamitous falling out and must slowly come to learn that they share more than the same size feet. In “The Holiday” (2006), Diaz was a disgruntled woman living in Los Angeles who realizes that the man she has been living with is having an affair. She meets an English woman (Kate Winslet) in love with a man in love with another woman online and the two impulsively decide to switch houses for the Christmas holiday, only to find the one thing neither of them want: romance. Meanwhile, Diaz voiced Princess Fiona for a third go-round in “Shrek the Third” (2007). Diaz returned to the screen for Shrek the Third in 2007, where she co-stars with former boyfriend Justin Timberlake. She was set to team up again with The Mask co-star Jim Carrey in the film Fun with Dick and Jane, but dropped out to star in In Her Shoes. She will also appear in Shrek 4 and is set to star in The Box, a horror thriller in 2008 co-starring James Marsden. On July 7, 2007, Diaz participated at Live Earth in New York by introducing Bon Jovi and The Police. In 2007, People ranked her as the Best Dressed Female Celebrity. Diaz dated actor Matt Dillon from 1995 to 1998. She is also the ex-fiancée of actor/musician Jared Leto. They had a low-profile relationship from 1998 to 2002. There had been reports that Leto had broken up with Diaz because he was jealous of her increasing acting popularity. Other reports have said that they broke up because Diaz was concentrating more on her acting as Leto was more concerned about his band. Most recently, Diaz dated former *NSYNC member Justin Timberlake, whom she met at the Kids' Choice Awards in 2003. The pair issued a joint statement on January 11, 2007, announcing they had broken up, following weeks of breakup rumors. In October 2004, Diaz and Timberlake were in an altercation with a tabloid photographer outside a hotel. When the photographer and another man tried to photograph them, the couple snatched the camera. Pictures of the incident appeared in US Weekly. Representatives for the pair claimed that they were "ambushed" and acting out of self-defense. Diaz has publicly admitted that she has OCD, is deeply germophobic and habitually rubs doorknobs so hard before opening doors to clean them that the original paint fades afterwards and along with her floors, she says, she washes her hands "many times" each day and uses her elbows to push open doors. Diaz has perhaps modified her fears somewhat, saying on May 10, 2007, "I think I've made my peace with it". Diaz received "substantial" defamation damages from suing American Media Incoporated, after The National Enquirer had claimed she was cheating on then-boyfriend Timberlake. Diaz also sued successfully to stop the publication of bondage-themed nude photos taken of her before she became famous. When Diaz was asked if she can speak Spanish she said: I go, "God, you know, it all sounds so familiar. I know what you're saying, I really do. I just cannot respond to you back in Spanish. I can barely speak English properly." I didn't grow up in a Cuban or Latin community. I grew up in Southern California on the beach, basically. And I'm third generation. I'm of Cuban descent, but I'm American. Diaz is currently represented by Creative Artists Agency. In September of 2004, Diaz created some controversy after her appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The show in question, concerned celebrities encouraging young people to vote in the upcoming Presidential election. While Diaz was sitting next to her Charlie's Angels co-star Drew Barrymore, singer Christina Aguilera, and hip-hop mogul Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, Diaz gave the ominous warning "Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies. We could lo--if you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body, and you have a right to say what happens to you and fight off that danger of losing that, then you should vote." Several pundits like talk show host Laura Ingraham alleged that Diaz was trying to disguise her scare tactic-like statement as another way of saying that if you didn't vote for Democratic challenger John Kerry, a victorious President George W. Bush would somehow try to ban the right to have a legal abortion. The actress was vocal of her support for Al Gore in 2000. Diaz went so far as sporting a t-shirt that read "I won't vote for a son of a Bush!" while making publicity for Charlie's Angels. |
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