Ali Larter

Spotlight

Twenty seconds in nothing but a whipped cream bikini in 1999’s Varsity Blues secured Ali Larter’s place in pop culture history. The Jersey girl signed with the Ford Modeling Agency at 13 after being discovered on a Philadelphia street and skipped senior year to work abroad. While strutting her stuff in Italy, she met model/future Varsity co-star, Amy Smart, who convinced her to pursue acting as roommates in LA. Esquire paid her to pose as a fictitious up-and-comer on a 1996 hoax cover. The article was fake, but the attention and agent it nabbed her was not and a string of TV guest appearances on shows like Just Shoot Me and Dawson's Creek followed. Her next stop was the big screen. She was in Drive Me Crazy, Final Destination, Legally Blonde and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. She did The Vagina Monologues off-Broadway in 2001 and decided to stick around NYC to reassess who she “wanted to be in this business.” At 30, she returned to LA from the self-imposed exile to star as a single mom with a super-powered alter ego in NBC’s sci-fi hit Heroes an installment of the Resident Evil franchise. While slowly becoming a fixture on the red carpet and the fashion scene, Larter met fellow actor Hayes MacArthur and quickly fell head over heels, admitting to Cosmo that she told him she’d marry him after three weeks of dating. The wedding actually happened almost two years later in Maine and she had a son, Theodore, in 2010.