Born: December 30, 1980 , Watertown, Massachusetts, United States
Height: 1.65 m
Partner: Rick Fox (2009–)
TV shows: Dollhouse, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Tru Calling, More
Siblings: Nate Dushku, Benjamin Dushku, Aaron Dushku
Eliza Patricia Dushku is an American actress known for her television roles, including major supporting role as Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff series Angel. She starred in two Fox series, Tru Calling and Dollhouse. She is also known for her roles in films, including True Lies, The New Guy, Bring It On, Wrong Turn and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, as well as her voice work on video games.
Early life
Dushku was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, the daughter of Philip R. Dushku, an administrator and teacher in the Boston Public Schools, and Judith "Judy" a political science professor. Dushku's father is an Albanian from the city of Korçë and her mother is of Danish and English descent. Dushku attended Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, and graduated from Watertown High School.
Personal life
Dushku in Dallas, Texas 2012
Dushku resides in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, California. She visited her father's family in Albania in 2006 after receiving an invitation from Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha. She visited Kosovo and got an Albanian Eagle tattoo on the back of her neck.While on her second visit to Albania in 2011, she applied for Albanian citizenship and obtained the Albanian passport and ID Card. She became an honorary citizen of Tirana, and was given the honorary title of Tirana Ambassador of Culture and Tourism in the World by Tirana mayor Lulzim Basha. Additionally, she was given honorary citizen status in her father's home town of Korçë, Albania.
She is the founder and CEO of Boston Diva Productions and serves on the board of directors of the THARCE-Gulu organization (The Trauma Healing and Reflection Center in Gulu), an organization dedicated to helping the survivors of war (including former child soldiers) in Northern Uganda. As a role model to campus leaders for her activism, Dushku was invited by the Millennium Campus Network (MCN) as a national keynote speaker and honored as a Global Generation Award winner alongside US Secretary of State John Kerry at MCN events in 2011.
Dushku began dating former Los Angeles Lakers basketball player Rick Fox in October 2009, and in August 2010 the couple confirmed that they were living together.
Dushku announced in December 2011 that she had decided to switch to a vegan diet after watching the documentary Forks over Knives.
Awards and nominations
Her performance in Tru Calling garnered Dushku two nominations in 2004: for a Teen Choice Award as Choice Breakout Star – Female, and for a Saturn Award as Best Actress in a Television Series. Maxim magazine ranked Dushku 6th on the "Hot 100 Women of 2009" list. Dushku was nominated in 2009 for a Scream Award for Best Science Fiction Actress for her role of Echo, and she was named Ambassador for the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show Entertainment Matters program in October 2011.
Early career
Dushku came to the attention of casting agents when she was 10. She was chosen in a five-month search for the lead role of Alice in the film That Night. In 1993, Dushku landed a role as Pearl alongside Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in This Boy's Life, a role that she said opened a lot of doors. The following year, she played the teenage daughter of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies. She had parts as Paul Reiser's daughter in Bye Bye Love, as Cindy Johnson in Race the Sun, and roles in a television movie and a short film.
Dushku took time off from acting to finish her junior and senior years of high school. She was accepted to the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and Suffolk University in Boston, where her mother serves as professor of government.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Dushku at the 2009 San Diego Comic Con.
After completing high school, Dushku returned to acting with the role of Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a Slayer much more troubled than the main character Buffy Summers. Though initially planned as a five-episode role, the character became so popular that she stayed on for the whole third season and returned for a two-part appearance in season four, after which the remainder of her original story arc was played out as part of the first season of the Buffy spin-off series Angel. Repentant and rededicated, Faith returned as a heroine in other episodes of Angel and in the last five episodes of Buffy. Dushku was inundated with piles of fan mail from legions of prisoners. She said:
I've been getting fan mail from maximum security penitentiaries and death row. What are the authorities thinking of in playing a show with young teenage girls to Death Row inmates? They write everything – disgusting things that you don't even want to know about. And they send me pictures – "Oh, here's a picture of me before I was incarcerated!" – and there's some guy sat on the sofa with a bottle of beer and a moustache, and a big gut. It's so creepy. Way more creepy than Buffy.
Subsequent roles
In 2000, Dushku starred in the hit cheerleader comedy Bring It On. She followed that up with Soul Survivors, reuniting her with Race The Sun co-star Casey Affleck. In 2001, she appeared in The New Guy with DJ Qualls and City by the Sea with Robert De Niro and James Franco. The latter film garnered attention from a wider adult audience and several good reviews. The same year, Kevin Smith invited Dushku to be a part of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
In 2003, Dushku starred in the horror film Wrong Turn and The Kiss, an independent comedy-drama. Starting that same year, she starred in a new Fox TV series, Tru Calling, where she played the main character, medical student Tru Davies. After having a grant pulled out from under her, Tru is forced to take a job at a local morgue where she discovers her power to "re-live" the previous day over again if one of the deceased asks for her help to change what has happened. Dushku turned down a role in a spin-off of Buffy The Vampire Slayer which would have been about Faith. She has had many roles as a "bad girl" in movies and relishes the opportunities. In an interview with Maxim in May 2001, Dushku says of her roles, "It's easy to play a bad girl: You just do everything you've been told not to do, and you don't have to deal with the consequences, because it's only acting."
Dushku starred in an Off-Broadway production entitled Dog Sees God from December 2005, playing "Van's sister", a character paralleled with Lucy Van Pelt from the Peanuts comic strip on which the play production is based. She quit in February 2006 along with other members of the cast amidst rumors of abuse from the producer, which were later dismissed.
She played the lead character on Nurses, a hospital comedy/drama for Fox. This was the second Fox pilot in which she was cast, but not broadcast.She appeared in the Simple Plan music video, "I'm Just a Kid", as the band's love interest, as well as Nickelback's video for "Rockstar".
Dushku has had roles in five video games. She voiced the role of Yumi Sawamura in the English-language version of Yakuza for the PlayStation 2, which was published and developed by SEGA, and released in September 2006. Dushku also stars as Shaundi, one of the lead characters in Saints Row 2, which was developed by Volition and published by THQ. It was released in North America on October 14, 2008, for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. She was the voice talent for the role of Rubi Malone, the main character in the game WET. She appeared at Spike TV's 2008 Video Game Awards in December 2008. Danielle Nicolet took over the role of Shaundi in Saints Row: The Third.
No comments:
Post a Comment