Tia Carrere biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Actress. Born Althea Janairo on January 2, 1967, in Honolulu, Hawaii. With a Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino background, Tia Carrere was a popular actress in the 1990s. She got her first big break from a chance meeting as a teenager. Carrere was approached in a Honolulu grocery store about appearing in a film, which turned out to be Aloha Summer (1988). During the time it took for the film to find a distributor, she had already moved to Los Angeles to pursue a modeling and acting career. Many were impressed with her great beauty and exotic look, which helped her land work in such magazines as Cosmopolitan.

Career Highlights

In 1985, Tia Carrere landed a role on the daytime drama General Hospital. For two years, she played Jade, a nursing student. But most of the drama happened off-screen as Carrere and the show’s producers became entangled in a legal battle as she tried to get out of her contract to take a role on the nighttime action series The A-Team. She lost the court case and finished out her contract.

Later that decade, Tia Carrere portrayed a vampy starlet in the television miniseries Noble House (1988) with Pierce Brosnan and Deborah Raffin. She also made guest appearances on such series as MacGyver, Anything but Love, Quantum Leap, and Married with Children around this time. In 1992, Carrere’s career got a tremendous boost from her part in the hit comedy Wayne’s World. She played sexy rocker Cassandra, the love interest of Wayne played by Mike Myers and reprised the role in the film’s sequel, Wayne’s World 2 (1993).

Along with comedy, Tia Carrere tried her hand at drama, playing a computer expert opposite Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes in Rising Sun (1993). That same year, she appeared in the box office hit True Lies (1994) with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jaime Lee Curtis. Also around this time, Carrere released the album Dream (1993), which featured a softer sound that the hard rock she performed in Wayne's World.

More Recent Roles

By the late 1990s, Tia Carrere's film career appeared to be waning with roles in such lackluster film projects, such as Kull the Conqueror (1997), Scar City (1998), and Meet Prince Charming (1999). She had better luck on the small screen. Carrere found some success a learned adventurer in the action series Relic Hunter from 1999 to 2002. Beyond her good looks, she found work as a voice-over artist for such animated projects such as the Disney film Lilo & Stitch (2002) and the television series Duck Dodgers. In 2006, Carrere took another daring turn, signing up to be a contestant on the hit series Dancing