Amy Adams - 80th Annual Academy Awards

Amy Adams Profile

Name: Amy Adams

Birth Name: Amy Lou Adams

Height: 5' 5"

Sex: F

Nationality: American

Birth Date: August 20, 1975

Birth Place: Vicenza, Italy

Profession: actress

Education: Alumna of the Chanhassen Dinner Theater in Minnesota

Claim to fame: won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance for her performance as Ashley in Junebug (2005)

Amy Adams Biography

Amy Lou Adams (born August 20, 1974) is an American actress and singer perhaps best known for her Oscar-nominated role as Ashley Johnsten in Junebug and her Golden Globe Award-nominated role as Giselle in Enchanted.

Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy, the daughter of American parents Kathryn and Richard Adams, who was a U.S. serviceman stationed in Italy. She grew up as one of seven children in Castle Rock, Colorado and was raised in the Mormon religion, although her family left the church after Adams' parents divorced when she was 11 years old. Throughout her years at Douglas County High School, she sang in the school choir and trained as an apprentice at a local dance company with ambitions of becoming a ballerina. However, after graduating from high school, she decided that she was "never going to be that good [at ballet], no matter how hard [she] work[ed]" and entered musical theater, which she found was "much better suited to [her] personality".

To support her community theater habit, Adams worked at Gap as a greeter and at Hooters as a hostess and a waitress, a fact which has "become [her] entire press career a while". She began working professionally as a dancer at Boulder's Dinner Theatre and Country Dinner Playhouse, where she was spotted by a Minneapolis dinner-theater director. Along with her family, Adams moved to Chanhassen, Minnesota, where she continued to work in regional dinner theater. While she was off work nursing a pulled muscle, Adams auditioned for the satirical 1999 comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous, which was being filmed in Minnesota, and was cast in her first film role. Persuaded by her Drop Dead Gorgeous co-star, Kirstie Alley, Adams moved to Los Angeles, California in 1998. Shortly after, she was cast in Fox Network's television series spin-off of Cruel Intentions, Manchester Prep, in the role of Kathryn Merteuil. The series did not live up to the network's expectations and following numerous script revisions and two production shutdowns, it was canceled. The filmed episodes were then re-edited to be released as the direct-to-video film, Cruel Intentions 2.

From 2000 to 2002, Adams appeared in a series of small films like Psycho Beach Party while guest-starring on television series such as Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville and The West Wing. She then appeared in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me if You Can as Brenda Strong, a role which was "supposed to be [her] big break" but she "was unemployed for a year after that". Adams starred in The Last Run in 2004 as well as voicing characters on animated television series King of the Hill. In the same year, she was cast in the television series, Dr. Vegas, in the role of Alice Doherty before she was fired after a contract dispute.