Rachael Leigh Cook

Rachael Leigh Cook was working before she could drive. She appeared in a public service announcement about foster care at seven and modelled as a child, most visibly in Target advertising and on boxes of Milk-Bone dog biscuits, then moved into children's films with The Baby-Sitters Club and Tom and Huck in 1995 and a small, sharp turn as the young Jackie-O in The House of Yes.

Then came the film everyone still names. She's All That in 1999 asked her to be a plain girl who becomes beautiful when someone removes her glasses, which is a joke on the premise rather than on her, and the role fixed her in place as the definitive teen makeover lead just as she was trying to do other things. Get Carter and Antitrust followed in quick succession, and then Josie and the Pussycats, a satire about manufactured pop that audiences ignored in 2001 and have been reassessing upward ever since. It is the best film of that period and the one she is most obviously enjoying.

The 2000s took her to television, where she was Kate Moretti across Perception, Penny Posin on Las Vegas and Abigail Lytar on Psych, with voice work in Robot Chicken, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker and as Tifa Lockhart in the English-language version of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Since roughly 2016 she has built a second, deliberate career in television movies and streaming romantic comedies, producing as well as starring, from Autumn in the Vineyard to Love, Guaranteed and A Tourist's Guide to Love. She also came back for the gender-flipped remake He's All That, in a different role.