Reese Witherspoon went from open-call hopeful to Forbes' highest-paid actress
Reese Witherspoon walked into a 1991 open casting call hoping for a bit part and left with the lead in The Man in the Moon. Three decades later she held an Oscar, an Emmy, her own production company and, in 2021, the Forbes title of the world's highest-paid actress.
She was born in New Orleans on March 22, 1976, to an otolaryngologist father who also served as an Army Reserve lieutenant and a mother with a PhD in pediatric nursing who taught at Vanderbilt. At seven she was picked to model in a florist's TV adverts, which pushed her into acting lessons, and at 11 she won the Ten-State Talent Fair. Her parents called her "Little Type A". She enrolled at Stanford to read English literature but quit before graduating to act full time.
Her first film cast her as Dani Trant, a Louisiana 14-year-old in the grip of first love, and Roger Ebert singled out her first-kiss scene as close to perfect. The 1996 thriller Freeway won her a Best Actress prize at the Cognac Police Film Festival, and playing the ferociously ambitious Tracy Flick in Election (1999) brought her first Golden Globe nomination. That role backfired for a while: she said casting directors assumed she really was that shrill, and she kept finishing second in auditions.
Legally Blonde changed everything in 2001. As Elle Woods she carried a film that took US$96 million at the American box office, and critics began calling her the new Meg Ryan. Four years later her June Carter Cash in Walk the Line won the Academy Award for Best Actress. A slump followed in which Water for Elephants (2011) was her only commercial hit, until she produced Wild (2014) and played the hiker Cheryl Strayed, earning a second Oscar nomination.
Since then her centre of gravity has been television. Through her company Hello Sunshine she has backed female-led book adaptations such as Big Little Lies, which won the Emmy for Outstanding Limited Series, and The Morning Show. She also owns Reese's Book Club and the clothing label Draper James, and by 2023 her fortune was estimated at $440 million. One family story does not hold up so well: her claimed descent from John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, has never been confirmed by the society that tracks signers' descendants.
Source: Reese Witherspoon
