With his golden curls, sensuous mouth, and sculpted body, Ryan Phillippe looks more like he was peeled off a Botticelli canvas than 'discovered' in a Delaware barber shop. Phillippe, who was born September 10, 1974 in New Castle, Delaware, has quickly risen from obscurity to become one of the most talked-about and drooled-over actors of his generation.

Phillippe got his first break on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, on which he portrayed daytime's first gay teenager, Billy Douglas. The role, which he played from 1992 to 1993, won him both favorable notices and increasing recognition. After quitting the show to focus on his screen career, Phillippe got a small part in 1995 submarine action thriller Crimson Tide. More work--and more boat-oriented action--followed in 1996 with Ridley Scott's White Squall, in which Phillippe was given a prominent role alongside two other up-and-coming actors, Ethan Embry and Scott Wolf. After this mainstream, big budget venture, Phillippe took a walk down the yellow brick road of independent filmmaking, first with his starring role as an abused trailer park teen in Little Boy Blue (1997), and then in Gregg Araki's Nowhere (1997) as the latest of Araki's trademark ultra-horny boys.

Phillippe's major screen break came with his role in the 1997 sleeper hit I Know What You Did Last Summer, in which he starred alongside fellow Next-Big-Things Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Sarah Michelle Gellar. The film's success, coupled with Phillippe's exposure from previous films, was enough to propel him into two leading roles in 1998, first as a blue-haired club baby in Playing By Heart, and then as a starry-eyed bartender in the critically disemboweled 54, a film which showcased Phillippe's abs over his acting.

Following 54, Phillippe opted to play a naive dope farmer in the obscure Homegrown (1998), in which he co-starred with Billy Bob Thornton and Hank Azaria. This preceded his next big break as the petulantly seductive trust fund brat Sebastian Valmont in 1999's Cruel Intentions, a film that was essentially a present-day, all-teen adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Co-starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as his scheming half-sister and Phillippe's real-life wife-to-be Reese Witherspoon, the film proved to be one of the year's most guilty pleasures, winning Phillippe further acclaim in the hearts and minds of lust-struck women and men alike.

Antitrust (2001)
Company Man (2001)
Cruel Intentions/Cruel Intentions 2 (2001)
The Way of the Gun (2000)
Cruel Intentions (1999)
54 (1998)
Little Boy Blue (1998)
Playing By Heart (1998)
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
Nowhere (1997)
L Lifeform (1996)
White Squall (1996)

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