Carrie-Anne Moss

Carrie-Anne Moss (born August 21, 1967 ) is a Canadian actress.

Moss's mother reportedly named her after the Hollies' 1967 hit song, "Carrie Anne", which had been released in May that year.

Moss lived with her mother in Vancouver as a child.

At the age of 11, she joined the Vancouver children's musical theatre and later went on to tour Europe with the Magee Secondary School Choir in her senior year.

While living in Spain, Moss obtained a role as Tara, the clerk to Judge Nicholas Marshall in the drama series Dark Justice, her first television appearance.

She headlined a short-lived made-in-Canada series entitled Matrix. For most of the 1990s, she appeared in several television series such as Street Justice, Baywatch, F/X: The Series, and Due South, for which she scored a nomination for the Gemini Award for Best Guest Actress in a Drama.

She moved from Barcelona to Los Angeles with the series in 1992.

Moss left Dark Justice before the series' third and final season and was replaced by Elisa Heinsohn as Samantha "Sam" Collins.

She enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena upon her return, and she subsequently starred in Fox's primetime soap opera Models Inc., a spin-off of Melrose Place, as a model.

Many of her film roles in the decade were in B movies, including Flashfire (1994), The Soft Kill (1994), Tough Guy (1994), Lethal Tender (1996), Sabotage (1996), and The Secret Life of Algernon (1997).

The series was cancelled in July 1995.

After early roles on television, she rose to international prominence for her role of Trinity in The Matrix series (1999–present).

Her breakthrough role came when she played Trinity in the science-fiction thriller The Matrix (1999).

Her role demanded extreme acrobatic actions, and she underwent a three-hour physical test during casting.

The film grossed over US$460 million worldwide and was highly acclaimed by critics, some of whom have considered it one of the greatest science-fiction films ever made.

Moss asserted that prior to being cast in The Matrix, she had "no career".

It launched Moss into international recognition and transformed her career; in a New York Daily News interview, she stated, "The Matrix gave me so many opportunities. Everything I've done since then has been because of that experience. It gave me so much."

Moss was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Actress, and for the MTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Female Performance.

She has starred in Memento (2000), for which she won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female, Red Planet (2000), Chocolat (2000), Fido (2006), Snow Cake (2006), for which she won the Genie Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role, Disturbia (2007), Unthinkable (2010), Silent Hill: Revelation (2012), and Pompeii (2014).

Moss had four film releases in 2000—Chocolat, Red Planet, The Crew, and Memento.

In the romantic comedy Chocolat, she took on the role of Caroline Clairmont, a cold, devoutly pious woman living in a French village.

As part of an overall positive response towards the film, The New York Times remarked that Moss, "as an upright widowed mother swathed in mournful baby blue, radiates glimmers of hurt; she shows it's not easy to keep up such a front."

The film made US$152 million at the international box office.

The science-fiction thriller Red Planet had her play the commander and leader of a rescue mission to Mars.

A.V. Club felt that Moss was "largely reduced to worrying while modelling a series of tight-fitting space fashions".

Despite a US$80 million budget, the film only grossed US$33 million worldwide.

She appeared as detective Olivia Neal in the crime black comedy The Crew, directed by Michael Dinner.

In Christopher Nolan's neo-noir psychological thriller Memento, she portrayed a manipulative bartender who meets a man suffering from anterograde amnesia.

Producer Jennifer Todd suggested Moss for the part after being impressed by her performance in The Matrix.

Nolan decided to cast Moss as Natalie, saying, "She added an enormous amount to the role of Natalie that wasn't on the page".

The film became a sleeper hit, being acclaimed by critics and earning US$39.7 million over a US$9 million budget.

She won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female for her performance.

Moss reprised the role of Trinity in the back-to-back sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, both released in 2003.

Like the original, The Matrix Reloaded received positive critical reception, and became a major box office hit, grossing US$742.1 million worldwide.

The Matrix Revolutions received a lukewarm critical reception, but made US$427.3 million globally.

During an interview with BBC Online, Moss expressed her pride for starring in the franchise, which she described as a "segment of [her] life": "It's deep and it's beautiful to have been part of it for so long. It's pretty spectacular".

She provided voiceovers for video game and animated spin-offs of the films.

She also portrayed Jeri Hogarth in several television series produced by Marvel Television for Netflix, most notably Jessica Jones (2015–2019).

Carrie-Anne Moss was born in Burnaby, British Columbia, the daughter of Barbara and Melvyn Moss.

She has an older brother, Brooke.