Amber Valletta

Amber Valletta is an American supermodel, actress, entrepreneur and sustainability advocate whose career has spanned more than three decades, beginning with a meteoric rise through the fashion industry in the 1990s and evolving into a steady run of film and television roles in the 2000s and beyond. Born on 9 February 1974 in Phoenix, Arizona, and raised primarily in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by her mother Cheryl after her parents divorced when she was a small child, Valletta grew up in modest circumstances that she has spoken candidly about in later years. Encouraged by her mother, she enrolled in modelling classes at the age of fifteen, a decision that swiftly altered the trajectory of her life when she was scouted and signed with a major agency before she had finished high school.

By the early 1990s Valletta had relocated first to Europe and then to New York, where her cool, almost otherworldly beauty, ash-blonde hair, sharp cheekbones and serene blue-grey eyes quickly made her a favourite of photographers such as Steven Meisel, Peter Lindbergh, Steven Klein and Bruce Weber. She became one of the defining faces of the so-called second wave of supermodels, a group that emerged in the wake of Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Cindy Crawford. By the age of twenty-one she had already appeared on the cover of American Vogue, an honour she would repeat numerous times, and had walked the runways for virtually every major house in Paris, Milan and New York, including Versace, Chanel, Prada, Calvin Klein and Valentino. Her partnership with fellow model Shalom Harlow, with whom she was frequently photographed and cast as a near-twin, became one of the most recognisable visual pairings of the decade.

Valletta's modelling success translated into an unusually long list of high-profile campaigns and contracts, among them long-term associations with Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, Louis Vuitton, Versace and Elizabeth Arden. Alongside her editorial and runway work she co-hosted the MTV fashion programme House of Style with Harlow in the mid-1990s, taking over from Cindy Crawford and helping to introduce a generation of viewers to backstage life at the collections. The visibility of House of Style gave her an early taste of presenting and on-camera performance, and she began to take acting classes during gaps in her modelling schedule, determined to build a second career rather than depend solely on the fickle economics of fashion.

Her transition to acting began in earnest at the end of the 1990s. After a small part in the comedy Drop Back Ten, she landed a supporting role in Robert Zemeckis's supernatural thriller What Lies Beneath in 2000, playing Madison Elizabeth Frank, the mysterious young woman whose disappearance haunts the marriage at the centre of the story. Cast opposite Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, Valletta delivered a quietly unsettling performance that demonstrated her presence on screen extended well beyond her photogenic features. The film was a substantial box-office success and gave her credibility in Hollywood that many models attempting the same crossover never achieve.

Through the 2000s she balanced fashion with a steady stream of film work. She appeared in the Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock romantic comedy Two Weeks Notice in 2002, played the femme-fatale crime boss Audrey Billings opposite Jason Statham in Louis Leterrier's action sequel Transporter 2 in 2005, and the same year took the female lead opposite Will Smith and Kevin James in Andy Tennant's hit romantic comedy Hitch, in which her character Allegra Cole, a poised heiress and tabloid magnet, becomes the unlikely object of an awkward accountant's affections. Hitch was an enormous global success and remains the role for which she is most widely recognised by general audiences. She also appeared in the satirical drama The Last Time in 2006 and reunited with Statham for Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's high-concept thriller Gamer in 2009, playing the wife of a death-row inmate forced to fight in a televised combat simulation.

On television, Valletta has been a recurring and reliable presence. She had a multi-episode arc on the CBS legal drama Family Law early in the decade, a guest role on Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and a memorable turn as the manipulative socialite Laurel Limoges on the short-lived but cult-followed CW series Hellcats. From 2014 to 2015 she played Conrad Grayson's ambitious girlfriend, the publishing executive Lyman, in ABC's prime-time soap Revenge, and from 2018 onwards she joined the ensemble cast of The CW's supernatural series Legacies, the third entry in the Vampire Diaries franchise, where she portrayed Jenny Saltzman, the mother of two of the show's central characters, in a recurring role that lasted across multiple seasons. She has also appeared in the streaming drama The Family, the mini-series Blood and Oil, and Apple TV+'s glossy soap The Last Tycoon.

Outside fashion and acting Valletta has built a reputation as one of the more thoughtful and outspoken figures of her generation in the modelling world. She has spoken openly about her struggle with addiction, having become sober in her twenties, and has used that experience to advocate for recovery and mental health awareness. In recent years she has become a prominent voice on sustainability in the fashion industry, working with the World Wildlife Fund's Cascading Materials initiative, sitting on the boards of Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii and Oceana, and campaigning publicly against fast fashion, microplastics and the broader environmental costs of the industry that made her famous.

She married photographer Hervé Le Bihan in 2003 and has one son, Auden, born in 2001 from a previous relationship; she and Le Bihan later divorced. Now in her early fifties, Valletta continues to model at the highest level, having appeared in recent campaigns for Karl Lagerfeld, Zara and others, and remains the rare figure whose career bridges the supermodel era, mainstream Hollywood and the emerging conversation about ethical consumption with equal credibility.