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Kristen Bell was born in Detroit, Michigan. She was raised in suburban Huntington Woods
and attended Royal Oak Shrine Catholic High School in nearby Royal Oak. There
she took the starring role in the school's 1997 production of The Wizard of Oz
as Dorothy Gale. She also appeared in Fiddler on the Roof (1995), Lady Be Good
(1996), and Li'l Abner (1998). In 1998, the year of her graduation, she appeared
in Polish Wedding, a movie that was being filmed locally.
Kristen Bell left NYU when she took a key role as Becky Thatcher in the
short-lived Broadway musical of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 2001. That same
year she officially made her credited film debut in Pootie Tang, though her
appearance in that film exists only in the credit sequence. In 2002, she
appeared in the Broadway revival of The Crucible.
Kristen Bell then appeared in a handful of television shows as a special guest before
landing a role in the Hallmark movie The King and Queen of Moonlight Bay in
2003. A year later, she appeared in the television movie Gracie's Choice.
In 2004, Kristen Bell made her big-screen debut, appearing in David Mamet's
Spartan as Laura Newton, the President's kidnapped daughter, acting alongside
Val Kilmer. Following this, Bell's career continued to progress as she won the
role of the title character in UPN's drama Veronica Mars, which was launched in
the fall of 2004. The show has earned positive reviews from television critics
and now is in its second season. Bell has also guest-starred on HBO's drama
Deadwood in a two episode story-arc.
Kristen Bell will appear as Gracie in Fifty Pills, to be released in 2006, and
continues to star in Veronica Mars. She is currently filming Fanboys, also to be
released in 2006. She now lives in Los Angeles and has made several appearances
on popular late-night television shows. A film version of her off-Broadway
musical Reefer Madness (a spoof of the 1938 exploitation film of the same name,
which was in turn based on an anti-marijuana propaganda film entitled Tell Your
Children) debuted on the Showtime network in April 2005, with Bell reprising the
role which she played in the musical. She appeared in a short independent film
called The Receipt. She also has the film Roman and the horror film Pulse both
scheduled for release in 2006, the latter of which is an American remake of the
Japanese horror film Kairo.

Kristen Bell, a vegetarian, was named by Jane magazine in the U.S.A. as one of
the "eleven people you'd most like to see naked." She posed for the magazine's
July 2005 issue. She also was named #68 on the Maxim magazine "Hot 100 of 2005"
list and was the Maxim cover feature for March 2006.
This Kristen Bell Biography Page is Copyright The Planets © 2004 - 2006 Chuck Ayoub