Amanda Seyfried

Amanda Michelle Seyfried, born December 3, 1985, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is an American actress and singer whose career has spanned modeling, teen ensemble comedies, blockbuster musicals, indie character pieces, and the prestige television role that finally won her an Emmy. Possessed of a wide-eyed, almost porcelain quality on screen and a soprano voice she has used in some of the most commercially successful musicals of the century, she has steadily built a body of work that resists the typecasting her early breakthrough seemed to invite, gradually establishing herself as one of the more versatile performers of her generation.

Raised in Allentown by her father Jack, a pharmacist, and her mother Ann, an occupational therapist, Seyfried began modeling at eleven and started taking voice and acting lessons not long after. She made her professional debut on daytime television, appearing on As the World Turns and All My Children while still a teenager, and graduated from William Allen High School in 2003 before briefly attending Fordham University. Her first major film role arrived almost immediately. Cast as the cheerful, sweetly oblivious Karen Smith in Tina Fey's Mean Girls in 2004, she delivered some of the script's most quoted lines and became, alongside Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, and Lacey Chabert, part of one of the defining teen comedies of the millennium.

Television followed quickly. From 2006 to 2011 she played Sarah Henrickson, the eldest daughter in Bill Henrickson's polygamous Mormon family, on HBO's Big Love, a role that gave her five seasons to develop a young woman wrestling with the contradictions of her upbringing. The series ran in parallel with a flurry of film work, including Veronica Mars, Alpha Dog, Solstice, and the comedy Nine Lives. Her first lead in a major studio picture came with the 2008 musical Mamma Mia!, in which she played Sophie Sheridan, the bride-to-be searching her mother's diary for the identity of her father. Opposite Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgard, Seyfried sang ABBA standards including I Have a Dream and Lay All Your Love on Me, and the film became an enormous global hit, grossing more than six hundred million dollars and reintroducing her to international audiences as a leading lady with genuine vocal chops.

The years immediately afterward were marked by an aggressive willingness to try almost anything. She starred opposite Channing Tatum in the Nicholas Sparks adaptation Dear John in 2010, headlined the romantic comedy Letters to Juliet the same year as a young American posting a long-lost reply to a lovelorn letter found in Verona, and took the title role in Catherine Hardwicke's stylish Red Riding Hood in 2011. She lent her voice to Jennifer's Body in 2009 as Megan Fox's bookish best friend Needy, played a call girl in Atom Egoyan's erotic thriller Chloe opposite Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson, and appeared in the science-fiction parable In Time alongside Justin Timberlake. In 2012 she took on one of her most demanding singing roles to date, playing Cosette in Tom Hooper's film of Les Miserables, performing live on set alongside Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe, and Eddie Redmayne in a production that won three Academy Awards.

She continued to alternate registers through the middle of the decade. Lovelace in 2013 saw her play Linda Boreman, the woman behind the pseudonym Linda Lovelace, in a sober biographical drama about exploitation and abuse. She joined Seth MacFarlane's western comedy A Million Ways to Die in the West, voiced characters in animated features including Epic and Scoob!, and reunited with the Mamma Mia! cast for the 2018 sequel Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, in which her Sophie anchors the present-day timeline while a younger ensemble plays the previous generation in flashback. Between those crowd pleasers she worked with Paul Schrader on First Reformed in 2017, an austere, theologically charged drama in which she played Mary, a pregnant parishioner whose husband's despair pulls Ethan Hawke's troubled minister toward crisis. Critics widely regarded the film as one of Schrader's finest, and her quietly grounded performance in it signaled a new seriousness about the kind of material she wanted to pursue.

That trajectory culminated in The Dropout, the 2022 Hulu limited series in which she played Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Tracing Holmes from awkward, ambitious Stanford dropout to black-turtlenecked Silicon Valley fraudster, Seyfried captured both the deepening vocal affectation and the brittle interior, and the performance won her the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie, along with a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award. It was her first Emmy win, and the consensus achievement of her career to that point. The same year she co-starred with Hugh Jackman in Florian Zeller's The Son and earned an Academy Award nomination earlier in her career for Mank, David Fincher's 2020 black-and-white portrait of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, in which she played Marion Davies with sharp comic warmth and earned a Best Supporting Actress nod. Her later projects include the Netflix thriller Things Heard and Seen, the legal drama Long Bright River, and a return to large-cast ensemble work in the Apple series The Crowded Room.

Off screen, Seyfried married actor Thomas Sadoski in 2017 after they met on the play The Way We Get By and reconnected on the film The Last Word. They have two children, a daughter born in 2017 and a son born in 2020, and split their time largely between New York City and a working farm in the Catskills, where she has spoken publicly about raising rescue animals and stepping back from the relentless pace of Los Angeles. She has been candid in interviews about living with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and has supported mental-health charities and animal welfare organizations. A trained singer who has released solo music as well as soundtrack work, she continues to balance film, television, and stage projects, her career now defined less by any single image than by a steady accumulation of varied, carefully chosen roles.