Kristen Nöel "Kristy" Swanson (born December 19, 1969) is an American actress best known for playing Buffy Summers in the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she also played Catherine "Cathy" Dollanganger in the movie version of the V.C. Andrews book Flowers in the Attic.
Early life
Swanson was born in Mission Viejo, California, the daughter of physical education teachers Rosemary and Robert Swanson. She has Swedish ancestry as the ancestral surname of her family was Svensson.
Swanson started her career at The Actors Workshop with R.J. Adams and promptly moved into TV advertising roles and several one-off appearances in TV series such as Cagney and Lacey and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In 1986, she debuted on the big screen in two John Hughes films: Pretty In Pink, in a non-speaking role, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off as a character who announces a convoluted excuse for Ferris' absence in class. Her first starring role was later in 1986, in Wes Craven's Deadly Friend as Samantha – "the girl next door". The next year she played Cathy in the adaptation of V. C. Andrews' best-seller Flowers in the Attic.
By 1990, Swanson had made many television appearances, including multiple appearances in Knots Landing (1987–1988), Nightingales (1989), her first starring role in a TV series, although it only lasted a season, and a short-lived Burt Reynolds television series called B.L. Stryker (1989).
Throughout the 1990s, she centered mostly in films. She played the title role in the 1992 movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was a box office bomb but had a profitable rental life. She appeared in both starring and supporting roles in movies such as Hot Shots!, The Program, The Chase, or her most critically acclaimed role as Kristen Connor, a student discovering her sexuality, in John Singleton's Higher Learning. She also appeared in the film adaptation of the comic-book The Phantom and the dark comedy 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag with Joe Pesci. Most of these films failed at the box office, and she reverted to TV work in the late 1990s.
In the 1998–99 season of Early Edition, Swanson played Erica Paget, a love interest of the main character, Gary Hobson. In 1999, Swanson played Vanessa, the girlfriend of Adam Sandler in the movie Big Daddy. In 2000, she returned to a television series, as the star of Grapevine, a revamp of a 1992 TV series that was cancelled after 5 episodes.
Swanson posed nude for Playboy magazine in November 2002 in a cover-featured pictorial. She appeared in and won the 2006 Fox television program Skating with Celebrities, partnered with Lloyd Eisler.
On May 8, 2007, Swanson appeared in the Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode "Bombshell", playing a fictionalized variation on Anna Nicole Smith.
In 2007, she became a spokesperson of the Medifast diet. In the following year, she guest-starred in 3 episodes of the lesbian web series 3Way.
In July 2009, she filmed What If..., co-starring Kevin Sorbo and Debby Ryan, released on August 20, 2010. It was her first theatrical film in 10 years.
Swanson made a cameo appearance in the "Don't You Forget About Me" episode of One Tree Hill, which aired on February 1, 2010. The episode was a homage to John Hughes; Swanson appeared in two films produced by him in the 1980s.
Swanson began a relationship with her Skating with Celebrities partner Lloyd Eisler during the show's run, while Eisler was still married to his then pregnant wife, Marcie. Swanson gave birth to a son named Magnus Hart Swanson Eisler on February 16, 2007, just one month after Lloyd's divorce from Marcia O'Brien was finalized. Swanson married Eisler on February 7, 2009 in San Luis Obispo. They currently live in Santa Clarita, California.
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