Brittany Daniel

An appealing blonde actress who got her start in projects pairing her with twin sister Cynthia, fresh-faced energetic performer Brittany Daniel went from teen model to young actress when she stopped growing at a relatively short 5'7." Appearing on the short-lived syndicated daytime drama "Swans Crossing" failed to jumpstart her career, but this onetime Doublemint twin found fame as Jessica, the wilder half of the Wakefield twins on "Sweet Valley High," the syndicated series based on Francine Pascal's long-running young adult book series. From 1994 to 1998 she played against type as the outgoing and opportunistic sister while her real-life twin played the more studious Elizabeth. With Cynthia, Daniel made her big screen debut in the gritty biopic "The Basketball Diaries," playing Blinkie alongside her sister's Winkie, two upper-class wild girls who run around with would-be heroin-addled poet Jim Carroll (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his pal Neutron (Patrick McGaw).

When "Sweet Valley High" ended production, sister Cynthia gave up acting for photography, and Daniel began to work on her own. She returned to series television with a recurring role as Eve on "Dawson's Creek" in 1999. As the mysterious new stripper/high school student intent on deflowering the all-too-serious Dawson, Daniel's Eve was a provocative, welcome addition to the cast, but audiences were only treated to her unexplainable antics for four episodes before her character revealed her secret and skipped town. A role in the direct-to-video thriller "Sonic Blast" (2000) kept her busy, while a supporting turn in that year's New Orleans on Mardi Gras-set disaster flick "On Hostile Ground" (TBS) brought her back into the public eye. In 2001, Daniel returned to the big screen, playing the dream girl of "Joe Dirt," David Spade's clueless loser on a journey to find his long lost family. Here she displayed the natural down-to-earth charm she played against on both "Sweet Valley High" and "Dawson's Creek," gently spurning Dirt's unwanted advances while sparing his feelings. Displaying a talent for comedy, and believable in action-packed thrillers, Daniel was a versatile performer who found a steady stream of work in projects as diverse as the short-lived "That 80s Show" (Fox, 2002) and the drama "11 Gramercy Park" to films like "Club Dread" (2004), and the Wayans brothers' "White Chicks" (2004) in a scene-stealing turn as one of the bitchy Vandergeld sisters, arch rivals to the blonde, white heiresses the Wayans are pretending to be.