Mia Kirshner

Mia Kirshner (2012)

Mia Kirshner (born January 25, 1975 in Toronto , Ontario ) is a Canadian actress .

biography

Mia Kirshner was born in 1975 in the Canadian province of Ontario to the German- born Sheldon Kirshner, a journalist for The Canadian Jewish News , and his Bulgarian wife Etti, an English teacher. Both parents are the descendants of Holocaust survivors and met in Israel .

Kirshner grew up in Toronto with a younger sister and began taking acting classes at a theater school at the age of nine. At the age of 13 she was signed by an agent and got her first roles on Canadian television. Kirshner completed her acting training at the Tarragon Theater and Young People's Theater in her hometown.

In 1989 she got a supporting role in the episode Loving the Alien of the American television series War of the Worlds . A year later, she was for the role of Sophie Metternich American US in the short-lived children's series Dracula is back ( Dracula: The Series ) committed (1990).

Kirshner began her film career in Canada in 1993 with the lead role of Page in Nicholas Kendall's Cadillac Girls . In the comedy, she played a rebellious young teenager who had to move to the Canadian provinces with his mother after her father's death. She celebrated her breakthrough as an actress with her second film, Denys Arcand's dark -humored comedy comedy Love and Other Cruelties (1993). For the supporting role of the psychically gifted Domina Benita , for which she was nominated for the Canadian Genie Award in 1994, Kirshner was praised by the New York Times for the combination of sensuality and innocence that she would have already conveyed in Atom Egoyan's Exotica . In Egoyan's film, which was released in the USA before love and other cruelty , Kirshner slipped into the role of the striptease dancer Christina , who is keeping a dark secret, alongside Bruce Greenwood .

Then American casting agents became aware of Kirshner and she got her first supporting roles in the Hollywood productions Murder in the First and Die Grasharfe in 1995 , in which she a. a. acted alongside fellow actors like Kevin Bacon , Gary Oldman , Sissy Spacek , Walter Matthau or Jack Lemmon . A year later she got the lead role in Tim Pope's action thriller The Crow alongside Vincent Perez .

After the supporting role of Kitty in Bernard Roses Tolstoy film version Anna Karenina in the (1997) Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean played the leading roles, elected in the same year the French - Greek director Constantin Costa-Gavras Mia Kirshner for the female lead in Mad City from ; her film partners were John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman .

When the hoped-for success as an actress in Hollywood did not materialize with this film either, Kirshner turned to smaller film productions and independent cinema. In 1999 she played the hedonistic and drug addict friend of Scott Caan in the drama Saturn . Kirshner first became known to a larger audience as a bisexual high school student in Joel Gallen's Not Another Teenage Movie (2001) before she turned to television.

Between 2003 and 2005 Kirshner was seen in the recurring role of the professional killer Mandy in the agent series 24 , which was also broadcast in Germany. She got a bigger role in 2004 in The L Word - When Women Love Women . In the television series about the love life of a clique of friends in Los Angeles , Kirshner discovered her homosexuality as the gifted author Jenny Schecter .

In 2006, the Canadian actress returned to the big screen with Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia . In the 1987 film adaptation of the novel of the same name by James Ellroy , which deals with the unsolved murder of Hollywood starlet Elizabeth Short , she played the title character alongside Josh Hartnett , Aaron Eckhart , Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank .

In addition to her work as an actress, Mia Kirshner studied Russian literature and the film industry of the 20th century at McGill University in Montreal from 1996 to 1997 . She also directed the short film Victor , who takes on a drag queen and her search for love.

In 2008 Kirshner's book I Live Here was published , in which she documents the life stories of refugee children from Africa , Mexico and Chechnya . On behalf of Amnesty International , which will benefit in part from the proceeds from the book, Kirshner has in the past u. a. Visited refugee camp in Chechnya. As a photo model, Kirshner posed for magazines such as Razor, Maxim , Gear, FHM and Stuff.