Lara Flynn Boyle Biography

news-details American actress Lara Flynn Boyle was born on March 24, 1970 in Davenport, Iowa, USA. She is the only child to 21-year old Sally Boyle and her husband who both got divorced when she was six years old. Following the break-up, Lara moved to Chicago with her mother, where they settled down near Wrigley Field. Since then she promised to never see nor speak to her father again. During that time, for Sally, money was not plentiful that she was required to work three jobs in addition to raising baby Lara by herself. Since Lara was mostly around Sally, the mother and daughter could 'till present day develop a bond.

At her young age, Lara had to struggle with dyslexia and learning disability that she consequently had to enroll in an improvisational workshop to develop ways of expressing herself. Won't let such disability took over her, she tried hard to be a tough girl. Across the course of the workshop, Lara developed a strong interest in acting, as well as a capability to do it. Fortunately, she was offered, and accepted, a scholarship to the Chicago Academy for the Arts. While she was still in her sophomore year in the academy, Lara received her first casting call for the TV miniseries "Amerika." The following year, she made her film debut in 1988's Poltergeist III, and went on to win a role in the 1989 made-for-TV movie "The Preppie Murder." Already gained a lot of television experience while still in her high-school years, Lara confidently felt that her course was set.

On the day after her graduation from the Chicago Academy, Lara and her mother moved to Los Angeles to build on the promising beginning of her career in the heart of the entertainment industry. In 1990, she landed in David Lynch's cult series "Twin Peaks," where she portrayed vixen-next-door Donna Hayward. Many people surely believed this role as Lara's big break, and turned out to be true that it widen her acting career to another level and served to typecast her to a certain degree. Sad to say that despite such fact, a great number of the roles came after her role in "Twin Peaks" had shared the same failure. The worst film ever that marked her series was the psychotic temp in 1993's "The Temp," which nearly equal to her previous roles, symbolized her films failure as box-office disasters. Moreover, her film "Farmer and Chase" also became the lowest grossing movie of 1997, raking in a whopping $1,323. Far from the fail films, �The Dark Backward� (1991), �The Road to Wellville� (1994), and �Baby's Day Out� (1994) had all bombed.

While such a rapid succession of failures might normally put an end to someone's career, Lara's talent indeed saved her from such a fate. It was her natural acting abilities that secured her several strong supporting roles, and the abundance of bad projects she was involved in was balanced out by appearances in movies, like "The Rookie" (1990) and "Wayne's World" (1992). Next, Lara performed in Todd Solondz's 1998 film entitled "Happiness," which received critical praise and garnered her the National Board of Review's Ensemble Performance Award. Soon then, in the late 1990s she returned to the small screen, in which after losing out the title role in Ally McBeal to Calista Flockhart, she landed the part of sultry cutthroat A.D.A. Helen Gamble in David E. Kelley's legal series "The Practice." The show had, in fact, be an instant hit, enabled her to favorably win the 1999 Emmy for Best Drama. After gaining much popularity from "The Practice," Lara appeared in �Men in Black 2� which also starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. And in recent year of 2004 she's been doing her latest TV series project namely "!Huff."

Later appeared in another TV show "Las Vegas" for eight episodes during year 2005-2006, Lara steadily moved on her path in the industry, going back to the big screen through �Land of the Blind� (2006) followed by �Fwiends.com� which also came up in the same year. Her film resume kept going larger as she smoothly joined two more flicks namely "A West Texas Children's Story" (2007) opposite Val Kilmer and "Life Is Hot in Cracktown" (2008), in which she was billed to play a cruel prostitute named Betty McBain.

As a young child, Lara was extremely shy so that she tried to overcome it by taking Irish folk dancing, art classes, and working in a local improved class. Yet, the now mature Lara has changed a lot, it's time and life experience that create such brand new Lara Flynn Boyle. Previously married to John Patrick Dee III on August 11, 1996 and got divorced in 1998, she was romantically linked to numbers of men since then, including Jack Nicholson, Richard Dean Anderson, Kyle MacLachlan, David Spade, and Eric Dane. Yet, the beauty finally gave her whole heart to Donald Ray Thomas, whom she married on December 18, 2006.