Lindsay Lohan Biography

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As with all long-running businesses, the selling of films has become ever-more sophisticated over the years. Audiences are now broken down into clear demographics and movies are conceived and pruned to target them. Perhaps the biggest market to have been recognized and tapped by major studios in recent times is the tweenie girl market, females who are still children but moving quickly towards maturity.

Her career was interrupted in 2007 as two driving under the influence (DUI) incidents and three visits to drug rehabilitation facilities led to several lost movie deals. Resuming her career, she guest starred in the TV series Ugly Betty in 2008, starred in the 2009 comedy Labor Pains, and appeared in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete in 2010. Lohan launched a second career in pop music in 2004 with the album Speak and followed up with A Little More Personal (Raw) in 2005. She has attracted significant publicity, particularly surrounding her personal life.

Naturally, new stars were required to front the films and, predictably, there were many, many applicants. Many applicants but only two clear winners – Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff.

Both would score smash hits onscreen, and both would engage in parallel careers in music. But it was Lohan, perhaps because of an already impressively lengthy CV, who’d come out on top. In 2004, Rob Friedman, Vice President of Paramount would say of her “Right now she’s the reigning teen queen. Lindsay is identifiable. She’s not an unreal personality.

Audiences can relate to her”. And how. Freaky Friday was a massive hit, she then headlined another in Mean Girls, then shared top billing with the world’s most famous VW Beetle in Herbie: Fully Loaded. And she was smart about it, too. Though her stock had risen to the point where she was paid $7.5 million for playing the lead in the light comedy Just My Luck, she also cleverly sought out adult movie-making experience by taking a bit-part as Meryl Streep’s daughter in Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion. The reigning teen queen was clearly preparing herself for the long haul.

She was born Lindsay Morgan Lohan on the 2nd of July, 1986, in Cold Spring Harbour, Long Island, New York. This place was a fair reflection of her Irish-Italian Catholic family’s fortunes at this point. A former whaling village, it had been popularised in the early 1900s by well-to-do New Yorkers like Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the founder of Tiffany’s, who founded estates there.

As time passed the area became famed for its bird sanctuary, the Muttontown Preserve woodlands and then a genetic and cancer research centre that spawned three Nobel Prize winners. Though just a few miles outside the New York conurbation, it was leafy, sparsely populated and rich. Come the year 2000 its population was still 91.3% white with a median income of over $200,000. It was Gatsby country.

So, the Lohans were doing well. Lindsay’s father Michael was a Wall Street trader who’d helped build his father’s pasta business into a multi-million dollar enterprise (he’d later sell it off to finance a move into film production). Lindsay’s mother Dina (nee Sullivan), meanwhile, brought an element of showbiz to the home, being a former TV actress and a member of the exclusive Radio City Rockettes dance troupe.

Originally inspired by the Tiller girls in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1922, the Rockettes had become the world’s top precision dance group and a major US icon. Having grown in numbers over the years to cope with a 4-shows-a-day 365-days-a-year schedule there were still only 36 Rockettes at any one time. Only the absolute best need apply.

Michael and Dina were both Long Island kids, but from the opposite side of the island. He came from Laurel Hill on the north shore, she from Merrick on the south. They’d marry in 1985. Lindsay was the eldest of four children, brother Michael being born a year later, then sister Aliana in 1994 and a second brother, Dakota, in 1996.

With such a showbiz and money-making background, it should come as no surprise that the Lohans were quick to make use of their first child’s precocious nature and red-haired and freckled good looks. Actually the first red-head to be signed by the Ford Modeling Agency, from the age of three she was appearing in TV and print ads, working for Abercrombie and Fitch, Gap, Pizza Hut, Wendy’s, Jell-O (with Bill Cosby) and Calvin Klein.

Taking dancing and singing lessons from the age of four, she boosted her employment possibilities even further, eventually scoring over 60 commercials. And she loved it. Her mother’s glamorous past saw little Lindsay idolising the likes of Ann-Margret (who’d toured with the Rockettes) and Marilyn Monroe while also being impressed by the absurd maturity of the young Jodie Foster.

It was no wonder that she felt her mother’s influence more strongly that her father’s as, in 1990, he was given a 4-year sentence in federal prison for fraudulent trading in commodities futures (he claimed he was just a fall guy). It would not be the last time Lindsay would suffer due to her father’s behaviour.

Having at age 7 appeared on The David Letterman Show as a piece of garbage in a sketch called Things You Find On The Floor Of The D-Train, it was inevitable that the ambitious Lindsay would gravitate towards acting and, at the age of 10 she scored a part on Another World, America’s second-longest-running soap, concerning the lives and trials of the folk of Bay City.

Many household had made a start here, including Morgan Freeman, Ray Liotta and Anne Heche, and Lindsay was taken on as Alexandra Fowler, conceived in sin by show favourites Amanda Corry and Sam Fowler and now having to cope with her mother’s tempestuous love life. Lohan would be her character’s third incarnation, following on from child actresses Kerri Ann Darling and Hillary Scott.

It was a peachy job with more dialogue than a 10-year-old would normally be trusted with, but Lindsay had to leave when an even peachier opportunity came her way. For the past six months Disney had been seeking a young actress to star in a remake of their own 1961 classic The Parent Trap, wherein Hayley Mills had cunningly manipulated a reunion of her warring parents. Come January of 1997, director Nancy Meyers finally chose Lindsay so, for the next eight months, she flitted between London and California’s Napa Valley, playing the separated twins who meet at summer camp and plot to bring parents Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson back together.

And she did a quite extraordinary job, not simply mastering a Brit accent but also the faltering accents of Brit and American kids trying to mimic each other. One review described her as “frighteningly poised”, she won a Young Artist award and it was clear that Lohan was something special. Disney certainly thought so (they’d have appreciated the $66 million US box office gross, too), signing her to a three-picture deal and offering her the adolescent lead as Penny in their forthcoming Inspector Gadget. Having spent so long away from home, though, she turned it down, the role being taken by Michelle Trachtenberg.

Lohan would now return to her school career, attending Cold Spring Harbour Junior and Senior High Schools where she would be a Straight-A student, excelling in science and maths, as well as sporting activities. Later, as her acting career gained pace, she’d spend a few months at Sanford H Calhoun High School in her mother’s home town of Merrick. She’d also receive home tuition from the Laurel Springs School (as had Elijah Wood).

After a self-imposed 2-year hiatus, Lindsay would begin to fulfil her obligations to Disney with Life-Size, a movie made specifically for Disney’s TV channel. Here her mother dies and her father deals with his grief by becoming a workaholic. Lohan, meanwhile, is more adventurous, using magic spells in an effort to resurrect her mum.

Unfortunately she only succeeds in giving life to a doll (Tyra Banks) who enjoys her new life so much she foils all of a horrified Lohan’s attempts to turn her back. Eventually, of course, everyone learns to get along, Banks becomes the friend Lindsay needs and daddy recognises his daughters pain. It was another fine role for a youngster, demanding far more than simple cuteness.

Life-Size was first shown in 2000, the same year as Lindsay won another, potentially fabulous, role. This was as Bette Midler’s daughter in the new sitcom Bette, where Midler would play a successful singer and actress struggling to stay at the top – herself, basically. The pilot would see Midler panicked into embarrassing attempts at rejuvenation when Danny De Vito mentions that he’d like her to play his mother, with Lohan (here named Rose after Midler’s biggest hit), popping up to exhibit teenage excruciation at her mum’s antics. And it was a success, a series being greenlighted.

However, the producers decided that as most of the crew were LA residents the show should be filmed there, rather than New York, where the pilot was made. This was no good for Lohan and she dropped out, being replaced by Marina Malota. As it turned out it was no good for New York-based Bette Midler either.

She was Golden Globe-nominated but after just 17 episodes the travel and pressure made her job too tough and the show was scuppered. In the meantime, Lindsay, also an aspiring musician, had signed a 5-album deal with Estefan Enterprises, run by Emilio Estefan, husband of the multi-million-selling Gloria. The idea was to groom Lindsay into a pop-rock starlet of the Avril Lavigne type, to be sold on to a major label.

Continuing with Disney, Lohan would now make Get A Clue, another production to premiere on the Disney Channel. In the spirit of Harriet The Spy (a hit for Lindsay’s Inspector Gadget replacement Michelle Trachtenberg), this saw her as a wealthy New York student with a flair for fashion and journalism who, when her teacher Ian Gomez goes missing, outwits all the adults while seeking the truth behind the disappearance. It was fairly typical Disney fare, complete with flashy editing and kid-pleasing music, but it was another step towards Teen Queendom.

If Get A Clue was a step, Lohan’s next effort was a giant stride. This saw her jump into the shoes of her former idol Jodie Foster as she starred in another Disney remake, this time the perennial favourite Freaky Friday, originally a hit back in 1976. Here Jamie Lee Curtis would play a widowed psychiatrist about to marry Mark Harmon, much to the chagrin of daughter Lindsay, a clean-cut punk and garage guitarist. After a big fight in a Chinese restaurant, mother and child are zapped by a fortune cookie curse and wake the next day to find themselves trapped in each other’s body.

The girl would make serious efforts to subvert her mother’s life, getting her ears pierced, cutting her hair and getting it on with a motorcycle boy (Curtis having great fun with the role) while mum’s desperately trying to cope in the bizarre and profoundly unfair world of High School (Lohan making fine use of the innate seriousness she shares with Jodie Foster). It was a screaming success, breaking the $100 million mark with ease and, boosted by Lohan’s own song Ultimate, its soundtrack entered the Billboard Top 20.

Lohan was now officially a hot property. Moving to LA she shared a Sunset Boulevard apartment with Raven-Symone, another child star who’d broken through on the Cosby Show and her own TV vehicle That’s So Raven (the pair had met at a Vanity Fair photo shoot featuring the cream of upcoming actresses). She’d also buy a BMW and start stepping out, dating pop star Aaron Carter, the younger brother of Backstreet Boy Nick, and gaining a reputation for fast living that was not helped by her friendship with the likes of Paris Hilton.

However fast she was living, though, she had nothing on her father Michael. With his marriage now in tatters, he was losing both his wife and, as Dina was acting as Lindsay’s manager, his kids, too. Lindsay spoke darkly of cocaine abuse as Michael fell deeper into trouble. While Freaky Friday was one of the hits of 2003, Michael ended the year facing charges of punching and swearing at a Manhattan sanitation worker who’d parked his truck in his way. Matters got worse in May the next year when, at Dakota’s communion party, he had an altercation with brother-in-law Matt Sullivan and whacked him with a shoe, sending him to hospital (he’d plead guilty in the December).

June would bring an arrest for allegedly doing a runner from a hotel bill of $3800. Then February 2005 would see him crash his car into a utility pole at Syosset, near his Long Island home, escaping just before the vehicle burst into flames. He was found to be not properly licensed and way over the alcohol limit. The following May he would plead guilty to drink driving, attempted assault, aggravated harassment (for threatening another brother-in-law over the phone) and criminal contempt (for breaking a restraining order by turning up at Dina’s house). It was requested that he be sent to drug rehab rather than jail, but the request was denied and he faced up to 4 years in prison. And his troubles weren’t over yet.

All this kept Lindsay under immense pressure as the work came flooding in. Her next film was another for Disney, Confessions Of A Teenage Drama Queen. This would see her as a boho New Yorker transplanted to the New Jersey suburbs where she attempts to get accepted by a High School elite who despise her wacky dress sense and also make it backstage at a big rock gig. While enjoying gaudy daydreams she also wins the lead in a school update of Pygmalion organized by nutso drama teacher Carol Kane and winds up singing the likes of Stevie Wonder’s Living For The City and David Bowie’s Changes.

It was an odd piece, fluffy but with a certain dark edge. It still, though, doubled its money, proving Lohan was now a force to be reckoned with. Even more successful would be her other release of 2004, Mean Girls. Produced by Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels, this was based on Rosalind Wiseman’s non-fiction bestseller Queen Bees And Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends And Other Realities Of Adolescence.

Adapted by SNL comedienne Tina Fey it was smart and funny, well beyond you average teen fare, seeing Lohan as a home-schooled girl who’s grown up in Africa, now arriving at High School for the first time. Taken on as a joke by Rachel McAdams’ cruel elite clique, she’s then mercilessly picked on and seeks Bushgirl-style revenge. As said, it was sharp stuff and another big hit, making Lohan the undeniable Teen Queen.

Throughout much of 2004, Lohan had been dating TV star Wilmer Valderrama, even appearing on his That 70s Show. She’d also signed to Casablanca Records, run by Tommy Mottola, the famed diva-maker behind Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez.

So, having split from Valderrama and recorded her debut album between takes on her next movie, Herbie: Fully Loaded, and with her father playing up and the press inventing stories about her love-life and supposed wild-child shenanigans (as if she had time), it was no surprise when she entered hospital suffering from exhaustion, a kidney infection and an asthma attack. She would return to hospital the following February with severe chest pains.

In the meantime 2005 began with a bang when her debut album, Speak, which cast her as a Britney Spears-type sex-pot, hit Number 4 on the Billboard charts (despite accusations that she had dared lip-synch while performing the song Rumors on Good Morning America). Then there’d be more success with Herbie: Fully Loaded, another Disney production, which saw her rescue the titular VW from the scrap-heap and, against the wishes of her motor-racing father Michael Keaton, take on the mean and macho Matt Dillon in a NASCAR event. Furthermore, she’d be brave enough to host Saturday Night Live for the second time, having already performed those fraught duties around the time of Mean Girls’ release.

Of course all these triumphs brought crazed tabloid attention. She was linked to Christian Slater, to Colin Farrell, even to Bruce Willis. Then her uncle Paul Sullivan was arrested, his Ropa Group, exclusive agents for the Hyundai Motor Company in the US, having allegedly misused a government loan of $1.5 million it had been given after sales fell following 9/11. She was burgled to the tune of $10,000. She suffered minor injuries when paparazzo Galo Ramirez drove into her car.

And naturally there was still her father. January had seen Dina file for divorce, leading Michael, apparently, to threaten to kill her and the children. August would bring the divorce trial, a dirty experience that saw Michael driving for a share of Lindsay’s millions and Dina battling for full custody, alimony and $1 million in damages.

Still in jail, Michael would attend court in handcuffs and, requesting some $3 million a year, described both Dina and Lindsay as “emotionally unsound” and demanded they both submit to drug and alcohol testing. News outlets would quickly receive a 7-page cease and desist document ordering them not to print Michael’s version of events.

He’d done nothing to help his daughter’s career, it was said. Rather he’d cheated on his wife and worried everyone sick by staying out for days on end. It was really ugly stuff but thankfully for Lindsay it was ruled that her earnings could not be considered in proceedings as they were not a direct product of Michael and Dina’s marriage. This was especially important as Lindsay was about to be paid $7.5 million for her part in Just My Luck.

Before Just My Luck would come Lindsay’s first move into adult features. Though she’d brought an amazing maturity to her teen roles, she would now test her ability against some of cinema’s finest actors by taking a part in Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion. This would concern Garrison Keillor’s famous radio variety show, a hit on 558 public radio stations, which featured a comic Keillor monologue about his fake home in Lake Wobegon, plus comedy sketches and live American roots music.

The movie would imagine the show being terminated unexpectedly, leaving singing cowboys Woody Harrelson and John C Reilly and country diva Meryl Streep to deliver one final performance as nutter Virginia Madsen runs riot (Kevin Kline, Tommy Lee Jones and Altman fave Lily Tomlin would also appear). Lohan would try to hold her own as the great Streep’s daughter. After this would come Just My Luck, another fuzzy comedy where Lohan would play a Manhattan girl known for her outrageous good fortune who suddenly, through some weird karmic interchange, begins to suffer the bad luck of down-and-out Chris Pine.

These last two movies would point to Lohan’s future direction. She would clearly aim to make the most of her Teen Queen status while also building for the future by gaining experience from the lustrous likes of Altman, Streep, Kline and Jones. With her singing career burgeoning, too, the only question would be whether she’d physically have the time to squeeze it all in.

In May 2008, Lohan made her first screen appearance since I Know Who Killed Me, on ABC’s television series Ugly Betty. She guest starred in four episodes, spanning seasons two and three in 2008, as Kimmie Keegan, an old schoolmate of the protagonist Betty Suarez. Lohan made a cameo appearance in the drug themed music video for the May 2008 N*E*R*D song “Everyone Nose”.

Lohan has featured in various men’s magazines. She was voted tenth on the list of “100 Sexiest Women” by readers of FHM in 2005,  while Maxim placed her third on its” Hot 100″ list in 2006 and first in 2007. In a poll by The Daily Mirror in February 2010, Lohan was voted tenth on a list of “sexiest redheads ever”. Lohan has been the face of Jill Stuart, Miu Miu, and Dooney & Bourke, as well as the 2008 Visa Swap British fashion campaign as well as being the face of Italian clothing company Fornarina for its Spring/Summer 2009 campaign.

Lohan has a long-lasting fascination with Marilyn Monroe going back to when she saw Niagara during the The Parent Trap shoot. In the 2008 Spring Fashion edition of New York magazine, Lohan re-created Monroe’s final photo shoot, known as The Last Sitting, including nudity, saying that the photo shoot was “an honor”. The New York Times critic Ginia Bellafante found it disturbing, saying “the pictures ask viewers to engage in a kind of mock necrophilia. … At 21 [Lohan] seems even older than Monroe, who was 36 in the originals … [and] the photographs bear none of Monroe’s fragility”.

In 2008, Lohan launched a clothes line, whose name 6126 was designed to represent Monroe’s birth date (June 1, 1926). The line started with leggings, before expanding to a full collection, covering 280 pieces as of April 2010. In April 2009, Lohan released a self-tanning spray under the brand name Sevin Nyne in collaboration with Sephora.

In September 2009, Lohan became an artistic adviser for the French fashion house Emanuel Ungaro; a collection by designer Estrella Archs with Lohan as adviser was presented in October, receiving a “disastrous” reception, according to Entertainment Weekly and New York. Lohan left the company in March 2010.

During the 2008 US presidential campaign, Lohan offered her services to Barack Obama’s election effort, including hosting events aimed at young voters; but her offer was declined. An unnamed source within the Obama campaign told the Chicago Sun-Times that Lohan was “not exactly the kind of high-profile star who would be a positive for us.” She nonetheless posted MySpace blogs with her opinions on the election, urging voters to support Obama, criticizing media coverage of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and describing Palin as homophobic, anti-abortion and anti-environmentalist. Lohan had previously expressed an interest in going to Iraq, during the Iraq War in 2006, on a USO tour with Hillary Clinton. Back in 2004, Lohan stated that she did not like to talk about politics in order to avoid alienating any part of her fanbase.

Lohan dated DJ Samantha Ronson in 2008 and 2009. Lohan co-hosted club events with Ronson and accompanied her when she was DJ-ing. Speaking about her sexual orientation, Lohan has said she is not a lesbian. When asked if she is bisexual, she responded “Maybe. Yeah”, adding “I don’t want to classify myself.” In April 2009, following her break up with Ronson, Lohan appeared in a skit on the comedy website Funny or Die. The self-deprecating video is a spoof of the personal ads on dating website eHarmony. It was viewed 2.7 million times in the first week and received favorable comments from the media.

In the 2009 comedy Labor Pains, Lohan plays a woman who pretends to be pregnant. During the shoot, Lohan’s manager worked with the paparazzi to encourage the media to show her working, as opposed to partying. It was originally planned for a theatrical release, but instead appeared as a TV movie on the ABC Family cable channel in July 2009, “a setback for the star” according to Variety. The premiere received 2.1 million viewers, “better-than-average” for the channel according to E! Online.

Joanna Weiss of The Boston Globe commented that Lohan “looks to be coasting through a part that requires little effort, anyway”. Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times said “this is not a triumphant return of a prodigal child star. … [Labor Pains] never shakes free of the heavy baggage Ms. Lohan brings to the role”.

Lohan was a guest judge on US TV style contest Project Runway sixth season premiere episode, which aired in August 2009. In December 2009, she spent a week in India working on a BBC Three documentary on trafficking of women and children. She is due to appear in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete, for which she was filming in August and September 2009 and which is scheduled for release on September 3, 2010.

In May 2009, producers announced Lohan was cast in the film The Other Side. Filming was scheduled to begin October 2009 on an island off the coast of Massachusetts. Lohan was fired, however, in April 2010, with the film’s writer-director saying, “Our team simply chose to move on from Lindsay and we’ll soon be announcing a replacement”.

In the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in March 2010, Lohan gave fund-raising assistance to the British Red Cross to provide aid for the country. The same month, Lohan commenced legal proceedings in which she sought $100 million from financial services company E*Trade for a television advertisement that Lohan claimed invoked her likeness without her permission. She appeared on British comedy chat show Alan Carr: Chatty Man on March 11, 2010, during which she spoke about her fashion work and her fascination with Marilyn Monroe, and refused to answer questions from host Alan Carr about her sexuality.

In April 2010, producers announced that Lohan was cast as adult-film performer Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat, in the film Inferno, scheduled to be directed by Matthew Wilder and produced by Chris Hanley. Filming is scheduled to start either in August 2010 or in Fall 2010. Lohan has defended herself against criticism of the role, saying that the film will not be pornographic. She gave an interview to the Sydney Morning Herald in which she said “the way that Matthew [Wilder] wants to shoot it is not vulgar. It’s not about the raw sex and the shots of her fully nude. It’s more about getting into her psyche and seeing how scared she was. That’s what I want to show most in the film. She went on to tell the interviewer that she had “never played someone’s true-life story before. A lot of the other movies I did were just brainless for me. So it’s nice to play something where I’m able to experience all these different emotions.”

In May 2010, Lohan did not appear for a scheduled DUI progress report hearing. The judge issued a bench warrant for Lohan’s arrest, but rescinded the warrant after Lohan’s representatives posted bail. Lohan’s lawyer said her passport was stolen while she attended the Cannes Film Festival in France. At a rescheduled hearing on May 24, 2010 Lohan was ordered to attend weekly alcohol education classes, wear an alcohol-monitoring bracelet, refrain from drinking alcohol, and undergo random weekly drug tests to remain free on bail. The judge scheduled a hearing for July 6, 2010 to determine whether Lohan had violated probation by not having attended the required number of classes to date.

In June 2010, Lohan made an appearance on the Bravo television series Double Exposure. She also gave an interview to The Sydney Morning Herald that month, telling the paper “I’m still young and I’m still learning but that doesn’t mean that what they say is true, that I’m getting messed up and all this crazy stuff and that I’m constantly partying or whatever.”

At Lohan’s July 6 2010 probation revocation hearing, the judge determined that Lohan had indeed violated the terms of her probation and sentenced her to 90 days in jail, starting July 20; in addition, the judge ordered Lohan to check into an inpatient rehab program for three months after her release from jail. On July 20 2010, Lohan appeared in court and was taken into custody to begin her jail term. Los Angeles County Sheriff officials stated that Lohan will spend only 13 days in jail pursuant to a policy of early release of non-violent offenders to reduce jail overcrowding.