Part of Charmed featuring Shannen Doherty and Holly Marie Combs, and Scream with Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox.
Rise to Fame
She got famous being murdered in a garage in Scream (1996). Drew Barrymore got the iconic opening-credits death, McGowan got killed by the garage door trying to crawl to safety, and her scene is the one that stuck. A few minutes of screen time put her on every horror highlight reel for years. The sustained work came when she joined Charmed in 2001 as Paige Matthews, sliding in after Shannen Doherty's abrupt departure. She stayed for five seasons. Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007) gave her the machine-gun leg she'd apparently been waiting for her whole career.
In the Spotlight
In October 2017, McGowan was among the first women to publicly accuse Harvey Weinstein of rape, saying the assault happened at Sundance in 1997. The $100,000 settlement she reportedly took from him that year didn't include an NDA, which turned out to matter. Time named her a Silence Breaker as part of its Person of the Year. Her memoir Brave came out in 2018. She left Hollywood for Mexico in 2020, describing the industry as structurally similar to the cult she grew up in.
Side Notes
She spent her first nine years in a polygamous religious sect called Children of God, living on a compound outside Florence while her father ran the Italian chapter. The group eventually began openly advocating sex between adults and children, and her father pulled the family out. She grew up with no television, no newspapers, and a working understanding that authority figures can decide new rules at any moment. Hollywood probably seemed manageable by comparison.