Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon (born March 22, 1976), simply known as Reese Witherspoon, is an Academy Award-winning American actress. Her first role was in the made for television movie Wildflower (1991), followed by several moderately successful family oriented comedies and dramas in the early to mid 1990s, and then the teenage thriller Fear (1996), where she became something of a teen idol. Witherspoon emerged as a young woman in Election (1999), as an obsessive, stressful, vindictive, and overachieving teenage girl determined to win everything she sets out to do. Witherspoon acquired her breakout role in Legally Blonde (2001), as a fun-loving blonde, a role she reprised in a sequel. Witherspoon received worldwide attention for playing June Carter Cash in Walk the Line (2005), a role that earned Witherspoon critical praise, media attention and an Academy Award for Best Actress. More recently, Witherspoon starred in Penelope, alongside Christina Ricci, set for an early 2008 release date.Witherspoon was born in New Orleans, Louisiana to John Witherspoon, a Georgia-born lieutenant colonel in the US Army reserves and later an otorhinolaryngologist, and Betty (née Reese), a nurse and college professor from Harriman, Tennessee. Her birth name is Laura Jean Reese Witherspoon. Witherspoon is allegedly a direct descendant of Scotland-born John Witherspoon, who was a signatory of the United States Declaration of Independence, the sixth president of Princeton University, and a Presbyterian minister. Witherspoon was raised in the Episcopalian religion. Because her father worked for the US military in Wiesbaden, Germany, she lived there for four years as a small child. After returning to the United States, Witherspoon, an army brat, spent much of her childhood and adolescence in Nashville, Tennessee, where, she says in Interview magazine, "I grew up in an environment where women accomplished a lot. And if they weren't able to, it was because they were limited by society. I grew up with a grandma--my father's mother—who was incredibly intelligent but was limited by the bounds of society and propriety ... She was a voracious reader, and she encouraged me to read a lot as a child ..." a woman whose "depression" and "disconnect between her capabilities and her lack of fulfillment and achievement" continue to motivate Witherspoon in life. After graduating from the prestigious private all-girls' Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, she attended Stanford University as a literature major. After completing a year of her studies, she left Stanford to pursue her acting career.
Witherspoon met American actor Ryan Phillippe at her 21st birthday party in March 1997, where, as she says, "I don't know what came over me – maybe the seven Midori sours – but I told him, 'I think you're my birthday present.' He thought it was so flattering, and now that I think about it... how embarrassing!" The pair got engaged in December of 1998. Soon after, the couple starred together in the box office hit Cruel Intentions. They were married on a plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 5, 1999. They have two children: daughter Ava Elizabeth, born September 9, 1999, and son Deacon Reese, born October 23, 2003.
A self-identified Southerner who has credited her family with fomenting her imagination and love for storytelling and privacy, she has said that her parental philosophy has roots in her upbringing. "We weren't the kind of children that were shadowed. We didn't have nannies. We didn't have housekeepers. This whole L.A. culture is so foreign to me, because when I was growing up you wouldn't watch your children every moment. I'm always confused when people bring their children over and then want to sit with them while they play. I think part of the joy of being a child is privacy. Your fantasies and dreams are so important to you at that moment."
