Laurie Holden was born Heather Laurie Holden in Los Angeles, California, to actors Glenn Corbett and Adrienne Ellis. When she was five, her parents divorced, and her mother married director Michael Anderson. Laurie then split her time between L.A. and Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Holden traveled the world with her family on various locations growing up, and got her first break as Rock Hudson's daughter in Ray Bradbury's Les Chroniques martiennes (1980). The young actress who was cast to play Hudson's daughter suddenly fell through and, at the age of nine, Laurie was thrown in to take over. Not bad for her first acting job.
As a teenager, she won the "Look of the Year" modeling pageant in Toronto. An avid academic, Holden initially looked at acting as a hobby and had plans to pursue a career in investment banking. She attended McGill University, where she studied economics, but made an unexpected switch to theater at the end of her freshman year. She transferred to UCLA and completed her BA in theater arts in 1993. Laurie studied acting under the late Robert Reed (of The Brady Bunch (1969) fame).
A dual citizen of Canada and the U.S., Holden's career got off to the kind of start most actors can only dream of. Upon graduating from UCLA, Holden was accepted as part of the National Honor Society and received the "Natalie Wood Award" for Best Actress. She went on to study the classics at The Webber Douglas Academy of Art and honed her craft under the tutelage of Larry Moss at The Larry Moss Acting Studio. It was while performing on stage in "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof", that Holden was discovered by Frank Darabont (Les évadés (1994), La ligne verte (1999)), who thought she was perfect for the lead in his Capra-esque drama, The Majestic (2001). Laurie's captivating feature film debut, starring as Jim Carrey's long lost love in the film, was met with critical acclaim by the New York Times and film critics around the world. Holden has created an arsenal of memorable characters in film, theater and television since she began her career as a child.
Since then, she has worked steadily in original films for HBO and Showtime and co-starred with Vanessa Redgrave in the TNT miniseries, Intrigues impériales (1991). She gained notoriety playing "Marita Covarrubias", the U.N. informant to Fox Mulder, on the long-running hit, X Files: aux frontières du réel (1993), and starred as the only female lead, opposite Michael Biehn, in the remake of the MGM classic, Les 7 mercenaires (1998), for CBS. Her episodic work on television is vast and includes a comedic turn in the critically-acclaimed, Tandem de choc (1994), for which she was nominated for a Gemini Award (a Canadian Emmy). Her memorable roles in such hits as Les 4 fantastiques (2005) (where she played Michael Chiklis' love interest) and the cult hero "Cybil Bennet" in Christophe Gans' artistic-horror video game adaptation of Silent Hill (2006) have made her a bit of a pop culture favorite with audiences of all ages. Holden recently starred "on the good side of the aisle" opposite Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden in the Stephen King/Frank Darabont film, The Mist (2007).
Named as one of the top 100 Most Creative People in Hollywood in Entertainment Weekly's "It List" and "One of Ten Actors to Watch" by Variety, Holden is actively producing film, theater and television projects, in addition to her acting pursuits.
