Melissa George

Melissa Suzanne George (born 6 August 1976) is an Australian and American actress.

She is an Australian national roller skating champion and won bronze medals in the National Championships in 1989 and 1990.

She won a silver medal at the Junior World Championship in 1991.

George began modelling in her early teens, and in 1992 was named Western Australia's Teenage Model of the Year.

At the age of 16, George and a friend, Cara Mitchinson, both acted in a mock episode of the popular Australian soap Home and Away with a video camera, playing Bobby and Sophie Simpson, respectively.

When the offer of a role on the serial came, George's parents convinced her to relocate from her native Perth to Sydney and she began lodging with families.

George met with casting director Liz Mullinar and was subsequently cast in the role of Angel Parrish.

She began her career playing Angel Parrish in the Australian soap opera Home and Away (1993–1996).

She made her first on-screen appearance on 30 March 1993, arriving as a teenage runaway.

While playing the role, George made property investments and wrote advice columns for two English teen magazines.

Her role earned her five consecutive Logie Award nominations, of which she won two.

The character became popular among viewers when she was paired up with Shane Parrish, and to this day they remain one of the soap's most loved couples.

George departed Home and Away on 30 August 1996.

She then made a health and fitness video, Mind, Body and Soul (1996), created a sleepwear line called "An Angel at My Bedside", and had a recurring role on the short-lived 1997 Fox Broadcasting Company television fantasy drama series Roar, which was filmed in Queensland, opposite Heath Ledger.

Her fearlessness in performing the show's stunts endeared her to the show's creator, Shaun Cassidy, who subsequently cast her as the female lead in the pilot Hollyweird.

A show about "the adventures of an intrepid pair of friends from Ohio who take their love for the macabre and use it to solve crimes plaguing Los Angeles", she was to star alongside Bodhi Elfman and Fab Filippo.

The pilot was ordered to series, however, the Fox Network's tinkering and delays frustrated Cassidy, who pulled out of the project, saying that Fox had forced him to spend "much of the last year trying to fix something I never viewed as broken in the first place."

Ultimately, production never went ahead on the show.

George then appeared on the cover and in a nude pictorial for the March 1997 issue of Australian Playboy.

In late 1997, George decided to relocate from Australia to the United States, hoping to establish a career in Hollywood.

She recalled her first day arriving in Los Angeles: "I saw Jennifer Jason Leigh in a parking garage, and [later] the same night, I went to a restaurant and I walked into the toilet and opened the door, and Courtney Love was sitting on the loo."

After moving to the United States, George made her feature film debut with a supporting role in the neo-noir science fiction Dark City (1998).

Within a year after relocating, George made her film debut in the critically acclaimed neo-noir science fiction film Dark City (1998).

After a supporting role in Steven Soderbergh's 1999 neo-noir crime film The Limey, she was cast in a supporting role, Cleo Miller, in the 2001 black comedy Sugar & Spice and had a minor role in David Lynch's critically acclaimed Mulholland Drive, which opened at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.

She starred in several unaired TV pilots, including the lead role in Lost in Oz, an original sequel to The Wizard of Oz, inspired by the Oz books of L. Frank Baum.

After the pilot was filmed, a significant amount of time passed before the decision was made to film a second episode.

However, by then George's contract had lapsed, and, as she had just moved to America, she didn't want to move back to Australia to shoot it.

Ultimately, a second episode was never shot and the show was never picked up.

She starred in the short-lived ABC drama-comedy Thieves, co-starring John Stamos.

She starred in the sixth season premiere of the WB series Charmed, had a minor role opposite Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor in the 2003 romantic comedy Down with Love and was originally cast as Susan Freeman in the American series Coupling based on the British series of the same name.

After "an audition from hell", George was cast and filmed the pilot, but the network (NBC) then fired the writers and replaced George and her fellow castmembers Breckin Meyer and Emily Rutherfurd with Rena Sofer, Colin Ferguson and Sonya Walger, respectively.

She made the transition to leading roles when she appeared in the supernatural horror film The Amityville Horror (2005), gaining further recognition for the crime thriller film Derailed (2005), and the horror films 30 Days of Night (2007) and Triangle (2009).

Outside film, George received a Golden Globe Award nomination for the HBO drama series In Treatment (2008).

She won the Logie Award for Most Outstanding Actress for her role in the Australian miniseries The Slap (2011), which she reprised in the 2015 American adaptation.

George was born in Perth, Australia, to Pamela, a nurse, and Glenn George, a construction worker.

Her paternal grandmother was a Scottish immigrant.

William Ward, a grandfather on her mother's side, worked as a prison warden at Rottnest Island, offshore from Perth.

The second of four children, she is also a cousin of the opera singer Taryn Fiebig.

George attended Warwick Senior High School and developed an interest in dancing and began studying jazz, tap, ballet, and modern dance at the age of seven.

Her enthusiasm for dance eventually evolved into a passion for artistic roller skating.