Jordan Ladd

Jordan Ladd (born January 14, 1975) is an American actress.

Ladd was born January 14, 1975, in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Charlie's Angels star Cheryl Ladd (née Stoppelmoor) and David Ladd, a producer and former actor.

Her parents divorced in 1980.

Her paternal grandfather was Alan Ladd, an actor and producer of American descent and her paternal grandmother was Sue Carol (née Evelyn Lederer), a Hollywood talent agent and actress of Jewish descent.

She has a step-sister Lindsay Russell an aspiring actress.

She began acting in film and television while in school, working with her mother in made-for-television films such as The Girl Who Came Between Them (1990) and Broken Promises: Taking Emily Back (1993).

After graduating high school, she took up acting professionally.

She spent the majority of the 1990s appearing in a variety of independent films in 1997, including Inside Out, Nowhere, and Stand-ins.

She graduated from high school in 1993, managing to lead a normal life despite her family's fame; she once remarked: "When I was in high school I used to go to the clubs, and of course that's exciting [...] You want to drink before you can and get into places you can't. But once I started acting professionally, I really didn't want to do the Hollywood nightlife thing."

She attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

The daughter of actress Cheryl Ladd and producer David Ladd, she initially worked with her mother in several made-for-television films, before making her big screen debut at 19, in the vampire film Embrace of the Vampire (1994).

In 1994, she guest-starred in an episode of the NBC series Saved by the Bell: The New Class and made her big screen debut with a supporting appearance as a promiscuous college student opposite Alyssa Milano in the film Embrace of the Vampire.

She subsequently appeared in the drama Nowhere (1997) and the comedy Never Been Kissed (1999).

In 1999, she appeared in Taking the Plunge, and also landed her first high-profile role alongside Drew Barrymore as a popular student who tortures an insecure copy editor in the teen comedy Never Been Kissed.

The film was a commercial success, grossing US$84.5 million globally, and gave her an initial wide exposure with audiences.

Ladd appeared in The Specials (2000), a comedy about a group of superheroes on their day off; in the film she played a neurotic named Nightbird.

By 2000, she also had starred as an actress who vying for an Academy Award in E! first original film Best Actress, and appeared in the critically acclaimed anthology film Boys Life 3.

She married her longtime boyfriend, documentary film editor Conor O'Neill, in 2001.

Ladd became known as a scream queen, having appeared in several successful horror films, including Cabin Fever (2002), Club Dread (2004), Death Proof (2007), and Grace (2009).

Ladd is also known for work with director David Lynch appearing in his films Darkened Room (2002) and Inland Empire (2006).

Ladd starred as a college graduate and the victim to a flesh-eating virus in the horror film Cabin Fever (2002), Eli Roth's directorial debut.

Ladd described working on the film as "insane," as it began shooting just a month after 9/11.

She remarked: "We shut down, we got up and running, and then we shut down again. We just hoped to finish the movie and hoped people would really understand and appreciate it. We had a blast doing it, even the tougher stuff. I'd rather work that way than on a big-budget fancy thing where you are completely separate from the process."

It was with this film that she began work in the horror genre, as she had a "real education on that way of storytelling" with Roth and the film.

Cabin Fever was largely praised by critics, and made US$30.5 million on a budget of US$1.5 million.

That same year, she played a crying woman in David Lynch's Japanese-style horror short Darkened Room.

In 2004, Ladd took on the role of a suspect in a recent string of murders on a vacationing island in the horror comedy Club Dread, and starred as a mental health facility nurse in the horror Madhouse.

The couple divorced in July 2005.

At the age of two, Ladd began appearing in commercials.

Her first commercial was for Polaroid.

In 2005, she appeared opposite Anna Faris, Ryan Reynolds and Justin Long in the independent romantic comedy Waiting..., and in 2006, she briefly appeared in David Lynch's film Inland Empire, which also starred her mother.

Quentin Tarantino cast her as a wild, partying Texan and the victim of a killer stuntman in Death Proof, his high-speed segment of the double–feature exploitation horror Grindhouse (2007), alongside Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms, Zoë Bell, and Kurt Russell.

The film flopped at the box office, but attracted significant media buzz and critical acclaim.

Director Eli Roth, in his contribution to Grindhouse, worked again with Ladd in a fake promo called Thanksgiving, which she shot "on the fly over" in Prague, where Hostel: Part II was being filmed; in the horror sequel, she played the girlfriend of the sole survivor of the first film.

In her next film, the horror Grace (2009), Ladd portrayed a woman, who after a car accident, decides to carry her unborn baby to term anyway.

The film was screened on the film festival circuit in North America, to critical acclaim.

John Anderson of Variety felt that Ladd played her role with "tongue planted firmly in cheek", in what he described as "a satirical creepfest that mines modern motherhood for all its latent terrors".

In 2009, she also starred in the made-for-television film The Wishing Well, as a journalist from New York City who gets sent to a small town in Illinois to report on a legendary wishing well.

Ladd filmed a comedic short film entitled First Dates, exploring the dating scene of several single people.

Her topless scene in Club Dread ranked 14th in Complex magazine's "15 Best Topless Moments In Mainstream Horror Movies".