Alicia Silverstone

• 1. Introduction

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  Alicia Silverstone, the American actress, was legally emancipated at the age of 15 so that she could make her first film. The shooting schedule for The Crush required a certain number of working hours, and emancipation was the way she met them. That was 1993. Over the following three decades her career would swing between teen idol, studio gamble, Broadway performer and supporting player in films by celebrated directors. Along the way she also became known for something far from the screen: a vegan lifestyle she promotes through books and public campaigns. How does a teenager become a household name through music videos? What does a young star do with a sudden surplus of Hollywood attention? And why did she step back from the spotlight just as it was brightest?

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• 2. Before the Spotlight

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  San Francisco is where Silverstone was born on the 4th of October 1976, to British parents. Her mother, Deirdre, known as Didi, was a Scottish former Pan Am flight attendant. Her father, Monty, was an English real estate agent. She has two older siblings, a half-sister named Kezi and a brother named David, and she grew up in Hillsborough, California. Her father came from a Jewish family, her mother converted to Conservative Judaism before the marriage, and Silverstone had a bat mitzvah.

  At the age of six she began modeling, and television commercials followed. The first was for Domino's Pizza. She later attended Crocker Middle School, then San Mateo High School.

  In 1992 The Wonder Years gave her a first credited acting role. In the episode "Road Test," she played the high school dream girl of the character Kevin. Early television films followed, including Torch Song, Cool and the Crazy, and Scattered Dreams.

  The Crush brought her a leading film role as a teenage girl who sets out to ruin an older man after he spurns her affections. At the 1994 MTV Movie Awards she won two prizes for it, Best Breakthrough Performance and Best Villain. That ceremony would hand her more trophies two years later.

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• 3. Three Aerosmith Videos

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  Director Marty Callner was preparing a music video for Aerosmith, called "Cryin'," when he saw The Crush and decided Silverstone would be perfect for it. In the finished video she is shown getting a navel piercing. That scene has largely been credited with introducing the navel piercing to mainstream culture.

  Two more Aerosmith videos followed, "Amazing" and "Crazy." The three were hugely successful for the band and for Silverstone, and together they made her a household name.

  Filmmaker Amy Heckerling watched all three videos and came away with a casting decision.

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• 4. Cher Horowitz

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  The summer of 1995 belonged to Clueless, a coming-of-age comedy that became both a hit and a critical darling. Silverstone played Cher Horowitz, a sweet but spoiled girl living in Beverly Hills. Columbia-TriStar responded with a deal valued between $8 and $10 million.

  The package also included a three-year first-look deal for her own production company, First Kiss Productions. Awards piled up for the performance. At the 1996 MTV Movie Awards she won Best Female Performance and Most Desirable Female. Prizes also came from the Blockbuster Entertainment Awards, the Kids' Choice Awards, the National Board of Review and the American Comedy Awards.

  Three other films reached audiences that same year. Le Nouveau monde, a French drama about Americans, cast her as the love interest of a French boy. In Hideaway, adapted from a novel by Dean Koontz, she played the daughter of a man who dies in a car accident and is revived two hours later. The Babysitter was a B erotic thriller directed by Guy Ferland, based on a short story by Robert Coover from his 1969 collection Pricksongs and Descants.

  First Kiss Productions would release its first film in 1997.

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• 5. Cape and Cowl

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  A direct-to-video thriller called True Crime, released in 1996, had Silverstone playing a Catholic school student who searches for the murderer of teenage girls. Her next role carried far higher stakes. In 1997 she played Barbara Wilson, also known as Batgirl, in Batman & Robin.

  The film was budgeted at $160 million and grossed a modest $238 million worldwide. Critics were polarized about her performance, and many considered the film one of the worst of all time. She won a Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actress. She also received a Blimp Award at the Kids' Choice Awards for the same role.

  Excess Baggage, the first film from First Kiss Productions, also arrived in 1997. Silverstone played a neglected young woman who stages her own kidnapping to win her wealthy father's attention, then is truly kidnapped by a car thief. It grossed only $14.5 million in North America. Reviews were mediocre, and Roger Ebert wrote that she was "no better than OK," feeling she was miscast.

  In 1999 she took the female lead in the romantic comedy Blast from the Past, directed by Hugh Wilson. Brendan Fraser, Christopher Walken and Sissy Spacek co-starred. Critics were mixed, and it earned a modest $40 million globally.

  The following decade would bring her a Broadway debut.

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• 6. Stage and Small Screen

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  Kenneth Branagh directed Love's Labour's Lost in 2000, and Silverstone played the Princess of France, a part that required her to sing and dance. The film received a limited theatrical release and mixed notices. Critic James Berardinelli felt she was "surprisingly credible" despite not being completely at ease with all of her dialogue.

  From 2001 to 2003 she executive produced the Canadian animated series Braceface and voiced its lead, Sharon Spitz. In 2002 she played a rock band's bassist in the independent comedy Global Heresy, opposite Peter O'Toole and Joan Plowright. That same year she made her Broadway debut in a stage version of The Graduate at the Plymouth Theatre, alongside Kathleen Turner and Jason Biggs. It ran until 2003.

  NBC's Miss Match came in 2003. She played Kate Fox, a Los Angeles matrimonial attorney who doubles as a high-end matchmaker. The network canceled it after only 11 episodes. Variety called her a fun, perky presence stuck with wafer-thin material. The performance still earned her a Golden Globe nomination.

  In 2004 she played a news reporter turned villainess in Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. Despite a negative critical response, it grossed $181 million at the international box office. Beauty Shop followed in 2005, a Barbershop spinoff in which she played a naive and bubbly stylist opposite Queen Latifah. It earned $37.2 million in North America. Pilots for Fox's Queen B in 2005 and ABC's Pink Collar in 2006 were never picked up as series.

  Stormbreaker, in 2006, had a $40 million budget and made $23 million worldwide. USA Today called her "simply ghastly," while View London remarked on "strong support" from the actress.

  The stage proved kinder. In 2007 she appeared in David Mamet's Boston Marriage at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, playing a Scottish maid. Variety wrote that she "steals the show." Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, directed by Randall Arney, followed at the same theater, with Silverstone as a secretary in a satire of Hollywood executives. The Hollywood Reporter described her performance as "a spectacular tour de force."

  A third Geffen Playhouse production, Donald Margulies's Time Stands Still, was waiting in 2009.

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• 7. A Busier Decade

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  Time Stands Still, set in Brooklyn and revolving around the relationships of two couples, reached Broadway in 2010. Silverstone reprised her role there alongside Laura Linney. Director Daniel Sullivan called her "a breath of fresh air." The New York Times felt she "brings warmth, actorly intelligence, and delicate humor."

  Sundance showed The Art of Getting By in 2011, with Silverstone as a teacher of a Manhattan private-school senior. In Butter that year she played the adoptive mother of a 12-year-old girl entering a butter sculpting competition in a small Iowa town. Amy Heckerling offered her the lead in Vamps in 2012 after seeing her in Time Stands Still. Silverstone played one of two vampires who fall in love and face a choice that could jeopardize their immortality.

  Broadway called again in November 2012 with The Performers, a comedy set at an adult film awards show in Las Vegas. Hurricane Sandy ended it after 23 previews and seven regular performances. In 2015 she starred in the New York production of Of Good Stock. Entertainment Weekly called her "magnetic," while The New York Times thought the part "a thankless part" that tipped her into comic shrillness.

  The year 2017 brought three films at once. She told an interviewer that Yorgos Lanthimos helped push her date, and that Diary of a Wimpy Kid held its movie for a week or two for her. In Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul she replaced Rachael Harris as the mother of the title character. Critics disliked the film, but its $40.1 million worldwide gross made it her most widely seen film since Beauty Shop.

  In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Silverstone played the widow mother of a mysterious boy who befriends his late father's cardiac surgeon. It competed for the Palme d'Or at the 70th Cannes Film Festival. Casting director Francine Maisler chose her after seeing her in a play, and her two scenes were filmed in one day. Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman co-starred.

  The series American Woman, which she also filmed in 2017, aired for one season on the Paramount Network. Book Club and The Lodge followed in 2018 and 2019.

  In 2020 she began starring in the Netflix series The Baby-Sitters Club, and in 2021 she appeared in Masters of the Universe: Revelation. Reptile came in 2023, co-starring Benicio del Toro and Justin Timberlake, and 2024 brought the A24 film Y2K and the comedy horror Krazy House.

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• 8. The Kind Life

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  "I realized that I was the problem... I was an animal lover who was eating animals." That is how Silverstone described the animal rights meeting that led her to become a vegan in 1998. She has said that as a child, "At eight years old it's hard to stick to your guns," and that she kept starting and stopping vegetarianism.

  In 2004 PETA voted her "Sexiest Female Vegetarian." In 2007 she appeared nude in a PETA print advertisement and a 30-second commercial, and Comcast Cable pulled the TV spot from the Houston market. In 2016 she posed nude for the group's "I'd Rather Go Naked" anti-wool campaign. She has set up a sanctuary for rescued pets in Los Angeles.

  In 2009 she released The Kind Diet, a guide to vegan nutrition, and launched a companion website called The Kind Life. It topped the Hardcover Advice & Misc. category of The New York Times bestseller list. A follow-up, The Kind Mama, came out in 2014. She received a Heart of Green Award in 2009 and a Voice of Compassion Award in 2010 from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Critics have also faulted her for an anti-vaccine stance, for promoting pseudoscientific diet and lifestyle choices, and for claims about the medical and spiritual benefits of veganism.

  Her activism has reached politics. Records list a $500 contribution to Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign. She supported Barack Obama, endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016, and in 2023 endorsed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the 2024 Democratic primaries while announcing she had left the Democratic Party to register as an Independent. In 2012, during the Pussy Riot trial, she wrote to Vladimir Putin asking that vegan meals be offered to all Russian prisoners.

  Her home life followed the same principles. In 1996 she bought a Los Angeles house, later fitted with solar panels and an organic vegetable garden, which she shared with a menagerie of rescued dogs. She met the rock musician Christopher Jarecki outside a theater in 1997 and dated him for eight years. They married at Lake Tahoe on the 11th of June 2005, and he had proposed with a ring that belonged to his grandmother. Their son was born on the 5th of May 2011. The couple separated in February 2018, and their divorce was finalized that November. In 2023 she appeared with her son in a PETA campaign urging schools to adopt alternatives to animal dissection.

  In 2024 she executive produced the British documentary I Could Never Go Vegan.

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