Danes, Claire Catherine (1979– )

US film, television, and stage actor. A highly accomplished teenage performer, Danes first rose to celebrity as the young star of the US television series My So-Called Life in 1994, a role for which she won a Golden Globe award and an Emmy nomination for Best Actress in a television drama. She went on to earn further acclaim for her performances as Juliet in Baz Luhrmann's contemporary rendering of William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Cosette in Les Misérables (1998).

Danes was born in New York and began studying dance at the age of six. She enrolled in the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute at the age of ten, and also studied at Dalton High School and the Professional Performing Arts School. As a child she appeared in modern-dance theatre productions of Happiness, Kids on Stage, and Punk Ballet. Danes also appeared in a handful of television movies, including More Than Friends: The Coming Out of Heidi Leiter (1994), before landing the role of a high school sophomore in My So-Called Life. In 1994 she also broke into the feature film industry, playing Beth March in Little Women (1994) and going on to feature in another female ensemble piece, How to Make an American Quilt, in 1995. Among her other films are The Rainmaker (1997), The Polish Wedding (1998), The Mod Squad (1999), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), It's All About Love (2003), Stage Beauty (2004), Shopgirl (2005), and Stardust (2007).