Lindsay Lohan

Lindsay Dee Lohan (born July 2, 1986) is an American actress and pop music singer. Lohan started in show business as a child fashion model for magazine advertisement and television commercials. At age 10, she began her acting career in a soap opera; at 11, she made her motion picture debut by playing identical twins in Disney's 1998 remake of The Parent Trap.

Lohan rose to stardom with her leading roles in the films Freaky Friday, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Mean Girls and Herbie: Fully Loaded. Her subsequent roles include appearances in A Prairie Home Companion and Bobby. In 2004, Lohan launched a second career in pop music yielding the albums Speak (2004) , A Little More Personal (Raw) (2005) and is now back in the studio recording her Third Album.

Early life

Lohan was born on East 236th Street in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx and grew up in Merrick and Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. She is the eldest child of Donata "Dina" (née Sullivan), a former Rockette, and Michael Douglas Lohan, Sr., a onetime actor. Lohan has three younger siblings, all of whom are actor-models: brother Michael Jr., whom she affectionately calls "Punk," appeared with her in The Parent Trap as the "Lost Boy at Camp"; sister Aliana had a small role in Freaky Friday, as did brother Dakota, the youngest Lohan child, whom she once saved from drowning.

Lohan is of Irish and Italian heritage and was raised as a Catholic. Her maternal family were "well known Irish Catholic stalwarts" in Merrick, with her great-grandfather, John L Sullivan, being a co-founder of the Pro-life Party in Long Island. In 2005, Lohan explained to a TEENick audience that she had decided to use Morgan as her middle name because it sounded more professional.

Lohan attended public schools on Long Island, including Sanford H. Calhoun High School. She finished her studies at home through Laurel Springs School of Ojai, California.

Her family was financially comfortable. Her mother was a Wall Street analyst before becoming Lohan's manager.[citation needed] Dina also claimed that she worked as a Rockette, though Radio City Music Hall records have not verified this claim.

Michael Lohan inherited his family's pasta business, which he later sold to trade in futures (briefly becoming President of New York Futures Traders). Sentenced to four years in prison in the late 1980s, he spent much of his daughter's preteen years in prison for securities fraud. More recently, he worked as an investment banker, securing funding for independent films. In 2005, he was sent back to prison for nearly two years, released in March 2007, for "aggravated unlicensed driving" and attempted assault. Michael currently works with Teen Challenge.

In December 2005, Michael and Dina Lohan signed a separation agreement. In August 2007, Lohan's parents announced that their divorce proceedings had been finalized.

Lohan began her career with Ford Models at age three, but found little work as a fashion model. She persisted and eventually appeared in more than 100 print ads for Toys "R" Us. She also modeled for Calvin Klein Kids (usually with siblings Michael and Ali) and Abercrombie Kids. Through young adulthood, Lohan was featured in such magazines as Vogue, Elle, Bliss (UK), Хай Клуб (High Club, Bulgaria), and Blenda (Japan).

Lohan's first auditions for television work did not go well; by the time she tried out for a Duncan Hines commercial, she told her mother that she would give up if she did not get the job.[16] She was hired, and went on to appear in over 60 commercials, including a Jell-O spot with Bill Cosby. Her ad work led to roles in soap operas, and she was already considered a show-business veteran in 1996 when she landed the role of Alexandra "Alli" Fowler on Another World, "where she delivered more dialogue than any other 10-year-old in daytime serials" of the time.

Lohan gave up Another World for the big screen when director Nancy Meyers cast her to play the dual roles of the estranged twin sisters who try to reunite their long-divorced parents (Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson) in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap. Hired in 1997 at age 10, Lohan was 11 when filming began in England and California (in Los Angeles and the Napa Valley). "I left school for eight months," she said. "When I came back, my friends [asked], 'Where'd you go?' I said, 'My family and I went on a long vacation.' Then the movie came out, and they were, like, 'Um, Lindsay? That's you in Parent Trap,' and I said, 'Oh, yeah. I also did this movie while we were gone.' Trap was well-received for a family comedy, bringing in US$92 million worldwide. Film critic Janet Maslin found Lohan's dual performances so forceful "that she seems to have been taking shy violet lessons from Sharon Stone."Critic Kenneth Turan called Lohan "the soul of this film as much as Hayley Mills was of the original, and … she is more adept than her predecessor at creating two distinct personalities".

Signed by Disney to a three-film contract, Lohan was offered the role of Penny in Inspector Gadget but turned it down.[citation needed] Later, she starred in two original television movies, Life-Size (2000) (with Tyra Banks) and Get a Clue (2002). She also played Bette Midler's daughter in the first episode of the short-lived series, Bette (2000), but Lohan, then 14, quit when the production moved from New York to Los Angeles. In 2001, she hosted the ABC-TV commercial series commemorating Walt Disney's 100th birthday during a rebroadcast of The Parent Trap.

Following a brief hiatus, Lohan won a lead role in another Disney remake: Freaky Friday (2003), starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Through 2005, Friday was Lohan's biggest commercial film success, earning US$160 million worldwide.

credit : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindsay_Lohan