Jennifer Tilly represents one of those American stories that prove that years of study, combined with firm determination, hard work and dedication to one's craft, can finally result in achieving what many would consider to be overnight success.

Jennifer's roots are in Canada, where she was a middle child in a family of six kids. As a youngster her family moved quite a bit, traveling from small town to small town, but the one thing that always remained constant was the closeness of the family and their love of culture. Though there never was a lot of money, there somehow always seemed to be a way to fit in tickets to the ballet, the theater, and movies. One defining moment for Jennifer came when she was in 5th grade, and a traveling troupe of performers stayed at the Tilly house while they were performing in the town. "I saw the talent and the passion they had for their work," Jennifer says, "and the way everyone treated them as someone special. That's one of the moments I knew I wanted to be a performer."

Jennifer began to nurture her talents and went on to study Theater in college, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Stevens College. Ever mindful of her dream to be not only a working actress but a movie star, soon after her graduation from college she got her driver's license and immediately set off for Los Angeles. "A lot of my friends said that I should head for New York to seek work as a serious actress," she says, "but I knew that if I wanted to get into movies then L.A. was the place to be."

Jennifer spent a number of years doing theater to hone her craft, working at odd jobs to pay the bills and pursuing her acting whenever she could. She worked almost continuously and achieved recognition by winning a Theater World Award for Most Promising Newcomer for her work in Tina Howe's play One Shoe Off at The Joseph Papp Theater. She also received a Dramalogue Award for her work in the play Vanities. "I love doing theater," Jennifer says, "because of the challenge of it. In theater, you're just out there, and it's up to you to perform to your best every night."

After doing many recurring roles and series work on television — and along the way garnering a nomination for a Gemini Award for Best Actress for her role in the Showtime's Heads and a nomination for a CableACE Award for her work on The Garry Shandling Show — Jennifer eventually found her big break in film with her role as Olive in Woody Alien's Bullets Over Broadway, for which she received an Academy Award nomination and an American Comedy Award nomination. She feels that this role represents some of her best film work, along with her later role as Violet in the movie Bound, which was the first time that her presence and her character had to carry a film. "I loved the challenge of doing Bound," she says. "It was a challenging, smart script, and Violet was against type for me, being so reserved. It was also a chance for me to add a lot of dimensions to her to do such a compl 

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