Elisabeth Moss biography

Synopsis

Child Actress

Actress. Born July 24, 1982, in Los Angeles, California. Elisabeth Moss was born to musicians Ron, a jazz musician and music manager, and Linda, who plays blues harmonica. Moss describes herself as being a "serious, focused" child. She excelled at school and her favorite childhood pastime was playing "library"—a game that involved her stacking books on the staircase and checking them out to her parents. Growing up in a show business family, Moss says she always wanted to be a performer. "I can't explain how I knew," she says. "There wasn't one defining moment. But you just know." She made her professional acting debut at the age of six in the TV miniseries Lucky Chances.

Despite this start, as a child Moss focused primarily on dancing rather than acting. She traveled to New York to study at the School of American Ballet and then to Washington, D.C., to study with Suzanne Farrell at the Kennedy Center. "It took all the pressure off of auditioning for acting roles," she recalls. "If I didn't get a job, I just went on dancing. It saved me from becoming that nine-year-old who has everything riding on getting that one part." She adds, "We all know that nine-year-old, and she's not a pretty picture." Nevertheless, at the age of 10, Moss did get that one breakthrough part, playing Baby Louise opposite Bette Midler in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Gypsy.

Moss was home-schooled by a private tutor and managed to graduate from high school two years early, in 1999, at the age of 16. Only a few months later, she landed a role opposite an Oscar-winning Angelina Jolie in the film Girl, Interrupted. Moss was so convincing as Polly, a teenage burn victim, that throughout filming costar Whoopi Goldberg believed she was an actual burn victim hired to play the part. "Whoopi really didn't know—a lot of people didn't, actually," Moss recalls. "But I would forget too, and then look in the mirror and be shocked. And that shocked feeling is right for Polly, the character—she's a child, she does forget about it." Around the same time she filmed Girl, Interrupted, Moss also began a long-running role as the president's daughter Zoey Bartlet on the TV series The West Wing. "I played her from when I was 17 to 24, off and on," she says. "That show was so well researched, but obviously I have no idea what it's like to be the president's daughter. I just tried to show a regular girl—with the Secret Service outside her dorm room."

Playing Peggy Olson

Moss landed her most visible role to date on the AMC series Mad Men in 2007. The show is set in early 1960s New York City and revolves around the employees of Sterling Cooper, an advertising agency on Madison ("Mad") Avenue.