Mary Elizabeth Winstead

Biography
Mary Elizabeth Winstead was born on November 28, 1984, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The youngest of five children, Mary has three sisters and a brother. She describes her mother as her hero.

As a girl, Mary Elizabeth Winstead showed a knack for singing and dancing, and trained for a while at the Joffrey Ballet School in New York. She became interested in acting at an early age. After playing Juliet in a fourth-grade production of Romeo and Juliet, Mary Elizabeth Winstead convinced her mother to find her an agent, and by the time Mary hit her teens, she was appearing on TV shows like Touched by an Angel and Promised Land.

mary elizabeth winstead on broadway
By the late 1990s, Mary Elizabeth Winstead was getting regular work, which meant taking a different life path than the typical teenager. She relocated to Los Angeles and was home schooled through most of high school, all the while racking up credits in indie films like The Long Road Home (1999) and onstage in the Broadway production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, starring Donny Osmond.

But it was on television that Mary Elizabeth Winstead spent the next few years honing her skills. Mary Elizabeth Winstead played Jessica Bennett on the soap opera Passions from 1999 to 2000; the following year, she became a regular on Wolf Lake. She appeared in the TV movies Then Came Jones (2003) and Monster Island (2004), and guest-starred on Tru Calling in 2004.
In 2005, Mary Elizabeth Winstead played the young Evelyn in The Ring Two, then took on her most notable role to date as Gwen in the teen superhero comedy Sky High.

mary elizabeth winstead in bobby
Even as Mary Elizabeth Winstead's career was taking off, she kept an eye on her education. Since finishing high school, she has taken two years' worth of college courses online. Meanwhile, Mary's profile only grew as she appeared alongside Peter Falk in Checking Out (2006) and starred in the teen horror movie Final Destination 3 (2006).

Mainstream success
Trying her hand at comedy, she went the independent film route as the Jewish daughter of a large, zany family in the indie feature Checking Out, but her screen time fared better in the more mainstream Walt Disney Pictures confection Sky High, which was both financially and critically successful. She starred as Gwen Grayson, the in-disguise alter ego of the supervillain Royal Pain.
After the exposure Sky High provided, 2006 saw her forge a professional relationship with the creative team of James Wong and Glen Morgan, formerly best known for their memorable contributions to The X-Files. She and her co-star, Ryan Merriman, landed in the path of the grim reaper’s master plan in Final Destination 3. She had failed to land a part in the second film in the trilogy, but found her place in the third instalment, which to this day is the most successful of the trilogy. Morgan and Wong wanted to collaborate with her again and convinced her to appear in their sorority slasher Black Christmas. The film, however, failed with critics and viewers. One day, she inadvertently received a chance to lampoon horror scream queens when The Tonight Show host Jay Leno, unaware of who she was, knocked on her front door and included her in a comedy segment spoofing horror movies.

--