Robin Wright biography

Early Life

Big Break

After high school, Robin Wright was encouraged to act by her modeling agent and landed a lead part on the soap opera Santa Barbara. Though she lacked any formal acting training and often shot her scenes the same day she received a script, with no rehearsal, Wright won three daytime Emmy nominations for her work on the show. This drew the attention of director Rob Reiner, who decided to audition her for the lead role in his new film, an irreverent 1987 take on Robin Hood-style swashbuckler films called The Princess Bride. An iconic film that resonated with children and adults alike, The Princess Bride launched Wright to stardom; her winning performance as Princess Buttercup suddenly transformed her into bona fide film actor at the age of 21. A year after the film's release, Wright divorced her first husband of two years, Dane Witherspoon.

Despite the success of The Princess Bride, Wright was ambitious and did not want to be typecast early on as a victimized damsel character actor. Determined not to let her blonde hair or good looks get in the way of more complex roles, she turned down one-dimensional, passive female parts in blockbusters like Jurassic Park and Batman Forever in favor of a much darker role in State of Grace, a gritty 1990 film about Irish gangsters. While shooting the film, she fell in love with her costar, actor Sean Penn, and became pregnant shortly thereafter with the pair's first daughter, Dylan Frances, followed soon by their son, Hopper Jack. She turned down the role of Maid Marian in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves due to her pregnancy. Next she starred in The Playboys, an Irish film, before taking on her next big role as Jenny in Forrest Gump. Like many of Wright's characters, Jenny is a tortured soul who suffers from drug addiction and depression but has a wild spirit and cannot be contained. The movie ends