Rise to Fame
She started modeling at 9, had a record contract at 13, and played the lead in Luc Besson's The Fifth Element by 21. Then her brother got obsessed with the video game Resident Evil, she tried to produce the film adaptation, and director Paul W.S. Anderson asked her to audition for the lead instead. She reportedly pushed back on auditioning at all. The franchise eventually ran six films, grossed over $1.2 billion worldwide, and made her the face of video game adaptations before the genre was taken seriously.
In the Spotlight
At 50, she's still headlining action films that studios consider a gamble, almost all of them with her husband Paul W.S. Anderson. In the Lost Lands came out in February 2025. Protector and Twilight of the Dead are in the pipeline. Her daughter Ever Gabo Anderson already played young Alice in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016), which might be the most on-brand family dynasty since the Coppolas. She's said the franchise is 'literally what my family is built on.' You'd have to go pretty deep to argue that's wrong.
Side Notes
She briefly married actor Shawn Andrews at 16 while filming Dazed and Confused; her mother had the marriage annulled two months later. She married director Luc Besson five years later, divorced in 1999. The music career is the real sleeper: an album (The Divine Comedy, 1994) she reportedly wrote at 15, a tour with Crash Test Dummies, and later vocal work with Maynard James Keenan's Puscifer. Forbes named her the world's highest-paid model in 2004. The modeling, the music, the marriages, the franchise: most people only know her for one of those.