Christina Ricci

Christina Ricci is an American actress born on February 12, 1980, in Santa Monica, California, the youngest of four children of Sarah and Ralph Ricci. Her father held a range of occupations over the years, including gym teacher, lawyer, drug counselor, and primal scream therapist. Her mother worked as a Ford Agency model in the 1960s before becoming a real estate agent. Ricci has described her ancestry as Italian, Irish, and Scottish. The family relocated to Montclair, New Jersey, where she attended Edgemont Elementary School, Glenfield Middle School, Montclair High School, and Morristown–Beard School. She later enrolled at the Professional Children's School in New York City.

Ricci's path to acting began at age eight, when a local theater critic noticed her in a school production of The Twelve Days of Christmas. She subsequently appeared in a pair of spoof commercials on Saturday Night Live, the first of which parodied the real-life dumping of biomedical waste along the East Coast. That appearance earned her her SAG-AFTRA card. Her film debut came in Mermaids (1990), in which she played Kate Flax, and she also appeared in the music video for "The Shoop Shoop Song" from the film's soundtrack. The following year she portrayed Wednesday Addams in Barry Sonnenfeld's The Addams Family, reprising the role in the 1993 sequel Addams Family Values. The two films grossed over $300 million combined. She took on her first leading film role in Casper (1995), which ranked as the eighth highest-grossing release of that year, and also starred in Now and Then (1995) and Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain (1995). A supporting role in Bastard Out of Carolina (1996), the directorial debut of Anjelica Huston, followed.

In 1997, Ricci appeared in the Disney remake of That Darn Cat before shifting toward more adult-oriented material with Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, in which she played the troubled teenager Wendy Hood. The following year brought three starring roles: Buffalo '66, John Waters' Pecker, and Don Roos' The Opposite of Sex, for which she received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress. In 1999, she headlined Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow as Katrina Van Tassel, earning the Saturn Award for Best Actress, and hosted Saturday Night Live in December of that year. Additional film credits from this period include 200 Cigarettes (1999), Bless the Child (2000), The Man Who Cried (2000), Prozac Nation (2001), Pumpkin (2002), Anything Else (2003), and Monster (2003). Later film appearances include Cursed (2005), Black Snake Moan (2006), Penelope (2006), Speed Racer (2008), Bel Ami (2012), and The Matrix Resurrections (2021).

On television, Ricci played Liza Bump during the final season of Ally McBeal in 2002 and received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for a guest role on Grey's Anatomy in 2006. She starred in the series Pan Am from 2011 to 2012, produced and starred in The Lizzie Borden Chronicles (2015) and Z: The Beginning of Everything (2017), and appeared as Marilyn Thornhill in the first and second seasons of Wednesday beginning in 2022. Since 2021, she has played Misty Quigley on Yellowjackets, a role that has brought her nominations for both the Primetime Emmy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 2024, she voiced Catwoman and Selina Kyle in the animated series Batman: Caped Crusader.

Ricci's Broadway career spans 2003 to 2010. She participated in The 24 Hour Plays in both 2003 and 2004, and in 2010 made her Broadway debut in Donald Margulies' play Time Stands Still. Away from performance, Ricci serves as the national spokesperson for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, known as RAINN.