Melissa Benoist

Melissa Marie Benoist (pronounced bə-NOYST) is an American actress and singer born on October 4, 1988, in Houston, Texas, to Julie and Jim Benoist, a physician. Her parents divorced when she was thirteen years old in 2002. She has two sisters, Jessica, a novelist, and Kristina, an ecological scientist, as well as five half-siblings from her father's remarriage. After her parents' separation, she was raised primarily by her mother in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado. Her paternal great-grandfather was of French descent.

Benoist began dance classes at age three in 1992, training in jazz, ballet, and tap. At four years old, her aunt cast her in a church play she was directing, which led Benoist to pursue community children's theatre in her hometown. As a teenager, she trained at the Academy of Theatre Arts, a musical theatre school in Littleton, Colorado, run by Paul Dwyer and Alann Worley, and performed anonymously at Disneyland in musical medleys for three summers through that program. She also appeared in several productions at the Town Hall Arts Center in the Denver metro area, including A Month in the Country, Cinderella, A Chorus Line, and Bye Bye Birdie, and performed Evita at the former Country Dinner Playhouse. In 2006, The Denver Post named her one of Colorado's five "Can't Miss Kids." She graduated from Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, in 2007.

Benoist then moved to New York City to pursue a career in musical theatre, initially enrolling in the BFA musical theatre program at Marymount Manhattan College before switching to a theatre major in her sophomore year due to her interest in nineteenth-century Russian plays. She graduated from Marymount Manhattan College with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Arts in 2011. During her college years, she played Millie Dilmount in an off-off-Broadway production of Thoroughly Modern Millie and Rosalind in As You Like It at the Theresa Lang Theatre. Her first film credit came in 2008 with Tennessee, alongside singer Mariah Carey. While still in school, she made guest appearances on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Blue Bloods, Homeland, and The Good Wife. In 2011, she played Kelly in the Goodspeed Musicals production of The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown by Bree Lowdermilk and Kait Kerrigan at the Norma Terris Theatre.

In May 2012, Benoist auditioned for the Fox musical comedy-drama series Glee at the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York, completing five auditions and singing songs including "Fidelity" by Regina Spektor and "King of Anything" by Sara Bareilles, among others. She was cast as Marley Rose, a role she held as a series regular during the fourth and fifth seasons. Her debut as Marley came in the season four premiere, "The New Rachel," in which she performed a duet of "New York State of Mind" with Lea Michele; that recording reached number twenty-four on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles chart. She and Glee co-star Darren Criss appeared with Josh Duhamel in the opening of the 2013 Kids' Choice Awards. She was not called back for the series in early 2014.

During this period, Benoist also expanded her film work. She played Nicole in Damien Chazelle's 2014 independent drama Whiplash, which won both the Grand Jury and Audience awards at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. That same year, she joined the cast of the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Longest Ride as Marcia. Additional film credits from this period include Danny Collins (2015), in which she played Jamie, a hotel desk clerk; Band of Robbers (2015), in which she portrayed Becky Thatcher in a modern retelling of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Patriots Day (2016), in which she played Katherine Russell, the widow of deceased Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev; Lowriders (2016), in which she played Lorelai; and Sun Dogs (2017).

In October 2015, Benoist took on the title role of Kara Zor-El in the CBS superhero series Supergirl, becoming the first woman to lead a prime-time superhero television series since Lindsay Wagner's The Bionic Woman ended in 1978 and Wonder Woman went off the air in 1979. The premiere drew 12.96 million viewers, and CBS issued a full-season order on November 30, 2015. The series subsequently moved to The CW for its second season. Benoist reprised the role in multiple Arrowverse crossovers, including "Invasion!," "Crisis on Earth-X," "Elseworlds," and "Crisis on Infinite Earths," as well as The Flash musical episode "Duet." She also voiced Earth-X's Supergirl doppelgänger Overgirl in the CW Seed animated series Freedom Fighters: The Ray and made her directorial debut with one episode during the fifth season. For her work on the series, she received the Breakthrough Performance Award at the 42nd Saturn Awards and the Best Actress on a Television Series Award at both the 44th and 45th Saturn Awards. Supergirl concluded on November 9, 2021, after six seasons and 126 episodes.

In April 2017, Benoist was cast as Rachel Koresh, the legal wife of Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh, in the Paramount Network miniseries Waco (2018). On stage, Benoist made her Broadway debut in 2018, portraying Carole King in the jukebox musical Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, a production she had also been associated with in 2014.