Bio
Neve Campbell is a Canadian actress best known for firstly her role as Julia Salinger on the television series Party of Five, and later in leading roles in several Hollywood films including the Scream trilogy, The Craft and Wild Things.
Early Life
Campbell was born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Her father, Gerry Campbell, an immigrant to Canada from Glasgow, Scotland, worked as a high school drama teacher at Lorne Park Secondary School in Mississauga, Ontario.
Her mother, Marnie Neve, is a psychiatrist from Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Campbell's maternal grandparents ran a theatre company in the Netherlands and her paternal grandparents were also performers.
Campbell is Catholic, but also identifies as Jewish because of her mother's Sephardic Jewish ancestry, specifying that her "lineage is Jewish, so if someone asks me if I'm Jewish, I say yes".
Her first name means "snow" in Italian and Portuguese; and "oasis" in Hebrew.
Campbell's parents divorced during her second year of life. She and brother Christian Campbell resided largely with their father, with regular periods at their mother's home, until Neve moved into residence at the National Ballet of Canada at age ten.
She trained at the National Ballet School of Canada at the age of nine, and appeared in performances of The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty.
Campbell moved from dancing into acting at the age of 15, performing The Phantom of the Opera at the Pantages Theatre in Toronto. Her first starring role was on the short-lived Canadian television series Catwalk.
Campbell attended Earl Haig Secondary School in Toronto, Ontario.
Career
Campbell rose to wider fame after being cast as the lead character, Julia Salinger, in the teen drama series Party of Five; she played this character from 1994 to 2000.
Campbell's first widely-released film was 1996's The Craft. She subsequently appeared in the successful Scream horror film trilogy (1996-2000), as well as Wild Things (1998), and Three to Tango (1999).
Following the end of the Scream series, Campbell's career became more low-key, and she appeared in several films that received a limited theatrical release, but were well reviewed by critics, including the 2000 film Panic, in which she starred alongside William H. Macy and Donald Sutherland, and the 2003 film The Company, about Chicago's Joffrey Ballet.
Campbell co-wrote, produced, and starred in the film.
Despite pre-release publicity suggesting otherwise, Campbell did not break her tradition of having a "no-nudity" clause in her contract for the film.
She did break the clause for When Will I Be Loved, released in 2004, a film which was praised by critic Roger Ebert, but which received only a brief and limited theatrical release.
Other films she has appeared in include The Dark (1994), 54 (1998), Drowning Mona (2000), Lost Junction (2003), Churchill: The Hollywood Years (2004), Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical (2005), Relative Strangers (2006), Partition (2007), I Really Hate My Job (2007), Closing The Ring (2007) and The Death of Harry Tobin (2008).
She has also acted in the made-for-TV movies I Know My Son Is Alive (1994), The Forget-Me-Not Murders (1994), The Canterville Ghost (1996) and Last Call (2002).
She has made guest appearances on numerous television shows, including Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Saturday Night Live and Medium.
In March 2006, Campbell made her West End theatre debut, in a version of Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues at the Old Vic theatre. The play, which received mixed reviews, co-stars Matthew Modine and Maximilian Schell, and was directed by Robert Altman, with whom Campbell has previously worked with in The Company.
She performed again at the West End later in 2006 as part of Love Song, starring alongside Cillian Murphy, Michael McKean, and Kristen Johnston, to mixed reviews.
Personal Life
Campbell married Canadian actor Jeffrey Colt on April 3, 1995; they divorced on May 8, 1998. She has also dated actors John Cusack, Matthew Lillard, and Pat Mastroianni.
Campbell appears in campaign literature and videos for the Tourette Syndrome Foundation of Canada and the Tourette Syndrome Association, (a similar organisation in the United States). Her younger half-brother, Damian McDonald, has Tourette syndrome.
She also has an elder brother, Christian Campbell, and another brother, Alex, both of whom are actors.
In 2005, Campbell began dating John Light, an English actor whom she met while filming the movie Investigating Sex.
The couple became engaged in December 2005 and live in London, England. When Light proposed, he got down on one knee and recited Shakespeare to Campbell.
They married in Malibu on May 5, 2007.