Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Eliza Dushku 2

Eliza Patricia Dushku (born December 30, 1980) is an American television and film actress, who has appeared in several Hollywood movies such as True Lies, The New Guy, Bring It On, and Wrong Turn. She is also well known for her acting on television, such as her recurring appearances on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel as Faith, as well as the main character in the series Tru Calling.

Dushku came to the attention of casting agents when she was 10. She was chosen at the end of a five month search throughout the United States for the lead role of Alice, opposite Juliette Lewis 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 also had parts as Paul Reiser's daughter in Bye Bye, Love, as Cindy Johnson with Halle Berry and Jim Belushi in Race the Sun, as well as roles in a television movie and a short film.

Dushku took some time off from acting to finish her junior and senior years of high school. She was accepted to the George Washington University in Washington, DC and Suffolk University in Boston, where her mother serves as professor of government and previously served as dean of the campus in Dakar, Senegal.

After completing high school, Dushku returned to acting with the role of Faith Lehane 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 entirety of the 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 spinoff series Angel. Repentant and rededicated, Faith returned as a heroine in a number of further 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 that:

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.

In 2000, Dushku starred in Soul Survivors, reuniting her with Race The Sun co-star Casey Affleck. She followed that up with the cheerleader comedy Bring It On with Kirsten Dunst, which was a surprising success at the box office that spawned straight-to-DVD sequels. In 2001, she appeared in The New Guy opposite DJ Qualls and City by the Sea opposite 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, where she co-starred with Shannon Elizabeth, Ali Larter, and Ben Affleck.

In 2003, Dushku appeared in Wrong Turn, a horror film in which she had the starring role, and The Kiss, an independent comedy-drama. Starting that same year, she also 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 and uses it to bring murderers to justice. Dushku turned down a role for which she would have been in a spin-off of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (that 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 from the original Peanuts comic strip on which the play production is based. She quit in February 2006 along with several other members of the cast among rumours of alleged 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 has been cast, but will not be broadcast. Dushku voiced the role of Yumi Sawamura in the English language version of the PlayStation 2 video game Yakuza, published and developed by SEGA, and released in September 2006. 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".

Jon Lester Pitches A No Hitter!


I know I haven't talked much about baseball yet this season, but that does not mean I have not been paying attention. I will probably post more about it after soccer season ends. But how bout this tid bit to tide us over. The first no hitter since Red Sox Right Hander Clay Buchholz's last September was thrown earlier tonight. By Red Sox Left Hander Jon Lester! In his first career complete game, he silenced the Kansas City Royals in style. On top of that, the game's Catcher. Red Sox captain Jason Varitek, became the first major league catcher to catch four no hitters (Hideo Nomo, Derek Lowe, Buchholz, and Lester). It was the teams 18th , which is second only to the Dodgers.


TomC