Emmy Rossum

A seven-year-old singing 'Happy Birthday' in all 12 keys is how the Metropolitan Opera found its next chorus member. Emmy Rossum spent her early childhood performing in 20 operas alongside Pavarotti and Placido Domingo for $5 to $10 a night. The real career inflection came in 2004, when she was the last actress to audition for The Phantom of the Opera and Andrew Lloyd Webber personally picked her. She was 16. The Golden Globe nomination that followed made her the youngest nominee in that category at the time.

Nine seasons of playing Fiona Gallagher on Shameless made her a prestige TV fixture, but the most defining moment of that run was her 2016 pay parity standoff with producers. She reportedly held out for equal pay with co-star William H. Macy and won. Since leaving in 2019, she's pivoted hard into producing. Three Women (Starz, 2024) and the Hulu series Furious (2025), which she leads and exec produces, are the clearest evidence that she's not waiting around to be cast.

Finishing high school at 15 via Stanford's online program for gifted youth is the kind of biographical detail that makes the rest of her career make sense. Her mother raised her alone after her parents separated before she was born, and she met her father only twice. She turned down classical recording deals after Phantom to keep acting, released two pop albums anyway, and quietly stopped making music in 2013. She met Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail when he cast her in his indie film Comet in 2013. He became her husband and her most frequent collaborator.