Mary Elizabeth Winstead was born on November 28, 1984, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The youngest of five children, Mary has three sisters and a brother. She describes her mother as her hero.

As a girl, Mary Elizabeth Winstead showed a knack for singing and dancing, and trained for a while at the Joffrey Ballet School in New York. She became interested in acting at an early age. After playing Juliet in a fourth-grade production of Romeo and Juliet, Mary Elizabeth Winstead convinced her mother to find her an agent, and by the time Mary hit her teens, she was appearing on TV shows like Touched by an Angel and Promised Land.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead didn’t know it at the time, but her early success may well have been hereditary. Screen legend Ava Gardner is her distant relative: “I really didn’t find out until I was older,” Mary explained, “and then my family were like, ‘Oh, by the way, she’s your cousin.’”

By the late 1990s, Mary Elizabeth Winstead was getting regular work, which meant taking a different life path than the typical teenager. She relocated to Los Angeles and was home schooled through most of high school, all the while racking up credits in indie films like The Long Road Home (1999) and onstage in the Broadway production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, starring Donny Osmond.

But it was on television that Mary Elizabeth Winstead spent the next few years honing her skills. Mary Elizabeth Winstead played Jessica Bennett on the soap opera Passions from 1999 to 2000; the following year, she became a regular on Wolf Lake. She appeared in the TV movies Then Came Jones (2003) and Monster Island (2004), and guest-starred on Tru Calling in 2004.

In 2005, Mary Elizabeth Winstead played the young Evelyn in The Ring Two, then took on her most notable role to date as Gwen in the teen superhero comedy Sky High.

Even as Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s career was taking off, she kept an eye on her education. Since finishing high school, she has taken two years’ worth of college courses online. Meanwhile, Mary’s profile only grew as she appeared alongside Peter Falk in Checking Out (2006) and starred in the teen horror movie Final Destination 3 (2006).

Mary Elizabeth Winstead was cast in Bobby (2006), a film based on the assassination of Robert Kennedy, starring Anthony Hopkins, and written and directed by Emilio Estevez. She also reunited with Final Destination director James Wong in the teen horror genre in Black Christmas (2006), a remake of the 1974 Canadian cult classic.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead had a busy year in 2007. She appeared in Live Free or Die Hard starring Bruce Willis. She was also seen in Grindhouse: Death Proof and Factory Girl.

With such big movies behind her in 2007, it came as no surprise when Mary Elizabeth Winstead was ranked at No. 91 on AskMen.com’s list of the Top 99 Most Desirable Women of 2008.

Showing no signs of slowing down in 2008, Mary Elizabeth Winstead signed on to star in the drama Make It Happen.
The film went straight to DVD in the US, and gained a small collection in the UK, which eventually led to its financial failure.

She is currently in Canada to film her upcoming movie Scott Pilgrim vs The World, due to release in 2010,