Rachel McAdams

Rachel Anne McAdams was born on November 17, 1978, in London, Ontario, Canada, and grew up in nearby St. Thomas. Her mother, Sandra, worked as a nurse; her father, Lance, was a truck driver and furniture mover. McAdams began competitive figure skating as a child, later turning to acting through school productions. She studied theatre at York University in Toronto, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2001. Before becoming a Hollywood fixture, she appeared in Canadian television, including The Famous Jett Jackson, and made her feature-film debut in My Name Is Tanino, released in 2002 in Canada.

McAdams’ breakthrough came in 2004, when she played Regina George, the queen bee of North Shore High School, in Tina Fey’s Mean Girls. That same year, she starred opposite Ryan Gosling in Nick Cassavetes’ adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ novel The Notebook, portraying Allie Hamilton. The contrasting roles made her widely recognizable. She followed them with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers, then played Amy Stone in The Family Stone. In 2005, she appeared as a hotel employee opposite Cillian Murphy in Wes Craven’s Red Eye, a thriller set aboard a flight. Her work spanned comedy, romance, and suspense.

Her later films included the political thriller State of Play, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, and its sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, in which she played Irene Adler opposite Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes. In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, McAdams played Inez, the fiancée of Owen Wilson’s Gil; the film received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. She also portrayed Paige Collins, a woman rebuilding her life after amnesia, opposite Channing Tatum in The Vow. In 2013’s About Time, written and directed by Richard Curtis, she played Mary, whose relationship with Domhnall Gleeson’s time-travelling character anchors the story.

McAdams earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Spotlight, the 2015 drama about The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team and its investigation of clerical sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. She played the journalist Sacha Pfeiffer, alongside Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Brian d’Arcy James, and Liev Schreiber. Spotlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture. McAdams later entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Dr. Christine Palmer in Doctor Strange and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. On television, she executive produced and starred as Detective Ani Bezzerides in HBO’s second season of True Detective.