Robin Wright Biography

Quick Facts

NAME: Robin Wright
OCCUPATION: Film Actress
BIRTH DATE: April 08, 1966 (Age: 47)
PLACE OF BIRTH: Dallas, Texas
ZODIAC SIGN: Aries

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Robin Wright

APA Style

Robin Wright. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 06:53, May 23, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/robin-wright-17191556.

Harvard Style

Robin Wright. [Internet]. 2013. The Biography Channel website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/robin-wright-17191556 [Accessed 23 May 2013].

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"Robin Wright." 2013. The Biography Channel website. May 23 2013, 06:53 http://www.biography.com/people/robin-wright-17191556.

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"Robin Wright," The Biography Channel website, 2013, http://www.biography.com/people/robin-wright-17191556 [accessed May 23, 2013].

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"Robin Wright," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/robin-wright-17191556 (accessed May 23, 2013).

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Robin Wright [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 23] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/robin-wright-17191556.

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Robin Wright, http://www.biography.com/people/robin-wright-17191556 (last visited May 23, 2013).

AMA Style

Robin Wright. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/robin-wright-17191556. Accessed May 23, 2013.

Early Life

Robin Wright was born in Dallas, Texas on April 8, 1966 but grew up in San Diego, California. The daughter of a pharmaceutical executive and an independent executive sales director for Mary Kay cosmetics, Wright was a natural beauty and began modeling at an early age, traveling to both Paris and Japan while still in high school. Wright says she pursued modeling mainly for the traveling opportunities it provided: "I think that the whole idea of beauty distorts your ability to not only find yourself,

but to have a healthy sense of your identity... And then I went to Europe and I didn't want to come home. I loved Europe so much."

Even though, as a teenager, Wright was elected homecoming queen and had a successful modeling career, she was actually more interested in dancing than in being photographed. "I think the inception of my interest in arts was when I was around 9 or 10 and I started dancing, she says. "I was really convinced that I was going to go to New York and be onstage in A Chorus Line. Then that idea was sort of usurped from my life because we moved to San Diego."

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 with Jenny dying from AIDS, a far cry from the irrepressible damsel Wright played in The Princess Bride.