Film
Reese Witherspoon
Actress and producer, Academy Award for Best Actress 2006
Born 1976
Photo: dtstuff9 · CC BY-SA 2.0
«If you want something done, ask a busy woman.»
Reese Witherspoon starred in Legally Blonde and won the Academy Award for playing June Carter in Walk the Line. As founder of the production company Hello Sunshine (Big Little Lies, The Morning Show) and a book club that can turn a novel into a bestseller overnight, she became one of the wealthiest self-made women in entertainment.
Key achievements
- Academy Award for Best Actress, Walk the Line, 2006
- Founded the production company Hello Sunshine, 2016
- Runs a book club that regularly creates bestsellers
Universities
Stanford, California (next to Palo Alto)
Enrolled in 1994 to study English literature and left after one year to take film roles.
Facts
- She put acting on hold after high school to study English literature at Stanford, then left after a year when she was offered parts in two films, Fear and Freeway.
- Legally Blonde (2001), in which her character Elle Woods talks her way into Harvard Law School, became a cultural touchstone and a Broadway musical.
- In 2021 she sold a majority stake in Hello Sunshine in a deal that valued the company at 900 million dollars.
- Reese's Book Club, launched in 2017, picks one novel a month; its selections routinely top the bestseller lists.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.