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Elizabeth Patricia Dushku (born December
30, 1980) is an American film actress, who has appeared
in several Hollywood movies such as True Lies, Bring It
On, and Wrong Turn. She is also well known for her
acting on television, such as her recurring appearances
on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel as Faith, as well
as the main character in the series Tru Calling.
Early life: Dushku was born in Watertown,
Massachusetts to Philip R. Dushku (born June 1, 1941),
an Albanian-American administrator-teacher in the Boston
Public Schools and Judith (Judy) Rasmussen (born March
30, 1942) (a half-Danish-American university
administrator and professor at Suffolk University); she
was raised a Mormon, the faith of her mother (though she
is not actively practicing).
She has three older brothers, Aaron,
Benjamin (Ben) (born February 5, 1976), and Nathaniel
(Nate) (born June 8, 1977, in Watertown, Massachusetts),
the last of whom is also an actor and a model. Her
parents divorced when she was still an infant.
Dushku was the only family with that surname in the
United States of America in 1920 and was living in
Massachusetts. Judith (Judy) Rasmussen's grandfathers
were both Danish, while both her grandmothers were of
Colonial English ancestry.
They belonged to the Mormon community of
Utah, Idaho and Arizona, where their most noted
ancestors and relatives have settled in the mid-1800's,
at the very beginning of both the colonization of the
State and the settlement of the religious community,
coming from the traditional States of origin of the
Mormon pioneers in New England, Massachusetts, Rhode
Island, Connecticut and Vermont. As a teenager Dushku
attended Beaver Country Day School and Watertown High
School.
Early career: Dushku came to the attention of
casting agents when she was 10. She was chosen at the
end of a five month search throughout the United States
for the lead role of Alice, opposite Juliette Lewis in
the film That Night. In 1993, Dushku landed a role as
Pearl alongside Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in
This Boy's Life, a role that she said opened a lot of
doors. Dushku says that DiCaprio taught her how to deal
with bullies and other high school dangers, for which
she is grateful.
The following year, she played the teenage daughter of
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies.
She also had parts as Paul Reiser's daughter in Bye Bye,
Love, as Cindy Johnson with Halle Berry and Jim Belushi
in Race the Sun, as well as roles in a television movie
and a short film.
Dushku took some time off from acting to finish her
junior and senior years of high school. She was accepted
to the George Washington University in Washington, DC
and Suffolk University in Boston, where her mother
serves as professor of government and previously served
as dean of the campus in Dakar, Senegal.
Later roles: After completing high school, Dushku
returned to acting with the role of Faith, a Slayer much
more troubled than the main character Buffy. Though
initially planned as a five episode role, the character
became so popular that she stayed on for the entirety of
the third season and returned for a two-part appearance
in season four, after which the remainder of her
original story arc was played out as part of the first
season of the Buffy spinoff series Angel. Repentant and
rededicated, Faith returned as a heroine in a number of
further episodes of Angel and in the last five episodes
of Buffy.
Because of her convincing portrayal of a sociopath, she
became an icon to many criminals. She was inundated with
piles of fan mail from legions of prisoners. She said
that:
I've been getting fan mail from maximum security
penitentiaries and death row. What are the authorities
thinking of in playing a show with young teenage girls
to Death Row inmates? They write everything —
disgusting things that you don't even want to know
about. And they send me pictures — 'Oh, here's a
picture of me before I was incarcerated!' — and
there's some guy sat on the sofa with a bottle of beer
and a moustache, and a big gut. It's so creepy. Way more
creepy than Buffy.
In 2000, Dushku starred in Soul
Survivors, reuniting her with Race The Sun co-star Casey
Affleck. She followed that up with the cheerleader
comedy Bring It On with Kirsten Dunst, which was a
surprising success at the box office that spawned
straight-to-DVD sequels. 2001 saw a busy time for her:
shooting The New Guy in Texas and having to shuttle up
to New York where she was reunited with actor Robert De
Niro and director Michael Caton-Jones in City by the
Sea. She played James Franco's junkie girlfriend and
mother of his child. The film garnered attention from a
wider adult audience and several good reviews.
The same year Kevin Smith invited Dushku to be a part of
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, where Dushku co-starred
with Shannon Elizabeth, Ali Larter, Ben Affleck, and
others.
Following her debut in That Night, which cast her as a
young girl who becomes infatuated with the rebellious
teen who lives across the street, the young actress did
supporting work in This Boy's Life (1993) and played the
daughter of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis
in True Lies (1994).
In 1998 Dushku got one of her biggest breaks to date
when she was cast as troubled slayer Faith on Buffy.
Although Faith was only meant to appear in a handful of
episodes, the show's creators liked Dushku enough to
make Faith a recurring character, and also featured her
on Angel, Buffy's spin-off.
Dushku had perhaps her most successful big-screen role
to date in Bring It On (2000), a high-school comedy that
cast her as Kirsten Dunst's reluctant but tough fellow
cheerleader.
The film was one of the summer's biggest money-earners,
and Dushku, unsurprisingly, was soon busy with a number
of new film projects. Included amongst them were Soul
Survivor (2001), a teen horror movie that also featured
Casey Affleck and Wes Bentley, and The New Guy (2001),
another comedy about the horrors of high school life.
In 2001 Eliza Dushku was considered for the role of
Paige Matthews on the WB hit Series Charmed but actress
Rose McGowan was given the role.
2003 saw the release of Wrong Turn, a horror film in
which Dushku had the starring role, and The Kiss, an
independent comedy-drama. Starting that same year, she
also starred in a new Fox TV series, Tru Calling, where
she played the main character, Tru Davies, a medical
student whose grant is pulled out from under her,
forcing her to take a job at a local morgue where she
discovers that she has the power to "re-live"
the previous day over again, an ability she used to
right wrongful deaths.
She has had many roles as a "bad girl" in
movies and relishes the opportunities. In an interview
with Maxim magazine in May of 2001, Eliza says of her
roles, "It’s easy to play a bad girl: You just do
everything you’ve been told not to do, and you don’t
have to deal with the consequences, because it’s only
acting."
Dushku starred in an off-Broadway production entitled
Dog Sees God from December 2005, playing "Van's
sister", a character paralleled with Lucy from
original Peanuts comic strip that the play production is
based on. She quit in February 2006 along with several
other members of the cast amongst rumours of alleged
abuse from the producer, which were later dismissed.
Dushku voiced the role of Yumi Sawamura in the English
language version of the PlayStation 2 video game Yakuza,
published and developed by SEGA, and released in
September 2006.
She also auditioned for the female lead in the sports
drama The Final Season. Dushku almost had the role, to
the point where the studio had purchased a wardrobe for
her, but she later dropped out to make a trip to
Albania. Rachael Leigh Cook got the part instead.
Eliza Dushku Foundation: Dushku has started The
Eliza Dushku Foundation, a new project with her father
to help Camp Hale, a summer camp for inner city Boston
boys open since 1974, where the Dushku family are
closely involved. Through the sale of props and fan
memorabilia, the Dushkus hope to generate increased
contributions in order to pay for the maintenance of
Camp Hale for generations to come. |
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