ryan phillippe
Ryan Phillippe. With his golden curls, sensuous mouth, and
sculpted body, Ryan Phillippe looks more like he was peeled
off a Botticelli canvas than 'discovered' in a Delaware barber
shop. Phillippe, who was born September 10, 1974 in New Castle,
Delaware, has quickly risen from obscurity to become one of
the most talked-about and drooled-over actors of his generation.
Phillippe got his first break on the ABC soap opera One Life
to Live, on which he portrayed daytime's first gay teenager,
Billy Douglas. The role, which he played from 1992 to 1993,
won him both favorable notices and increasing recognition.
After quitting the show to focus on his screen career, Phillippe
got a small part in 1995 submarine action thriller Crimson
Tide. More work--and more boat-oriented action--followed in
1996 with Ridley Scott's White Squall, in which Phillippe
was given a prominent role alongside two other up-and-coming
actors, Ethan Embry and Scott Wolf. After this mainstream,
big budget venture, Phillippe took a walk down the yellow
brick road of independent filmmaking, first with his starring
role as an abused trailer park teen in Little Boy Blue (1997),
and then in Gregg Araki's Nowhere (1997) as the latest of
Araki's trademark ultra-horny boys.
Phillippe's major screen break came with his role in the
1997 sleeper hit I Know What You Did Last Summer, in which
he starred alongside fellow Next-Big-Things Jennifer Love
Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Sarah Michelle Gellar. The
film's success, coupled with Phillippe's exposure from previous
films, was enough to propel him into two leading roles in
1998, first as a blue-haired club baby in Playing By Heart,
and then as a starry-eyed bartender in the critically disemboweled
54, a film which showcased Phillippe's abs over his acting.
Following 54, Phillippe opted to play a naive dope farmer
in the obscure Homegrown (1998), in which he co-starred with
Billy Bob Thornton and Hank Azaria. This preceded his next
big break as the petulantly seductive trust fund brat Sebastian
Valmont in 1999's Cruel Intentions, a film that was essentially
a present-day, all-teen adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos'
Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Co-starring Sarah Michelle Gellar
as his scheming half-sister and Phillippe's real-life wife-to-be
Reese Witherspoon, the film proved to be one of the year's
most guilty pleasures, winning Phillippe further acclaim in
the hearts and minds of lust-struck women and men alike.
Filmography
Antitrust (2001)
Company Man (2001)
Cruel Intentions/Cruel Intentions 2 (2001)
The Way of the Gun (2000)
Cruel Intentions (1999)
54 (1998)
Little Boy Blue (1998)
Playing By Heart (1998)
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
Nowhere (1997)
L Lifeform (1996)
White Squall (1996)
more celebrities...
