Why Is She Famous?
Best known to American audiences for her roles in Art School Confidential (2006) and on Showtime’s The L Word, Lauren Lee Smith remains an acting presence in her native Canada. Her works in Canada include TV shows such as Intelligence and films like Lie with Me (2005), which played at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Biography
Lauren Lee Smith, the stepdaughter of a documentary filmmaker, spent much of her youth traveling with her family. Although Lauren was born in Canada, she has also lived in the U.S., Europe and parts of Central America. Despite her nomadic lifestyle, a fashion scout managed to spot Lauren when she was 13. The following year, her family settled in Los Angeles, where Lauren worked as a model throughout her teen years.
Lauren began her acting career when she was 19; she held a small part in Sylvester Stallone’s Get Carter (2000). Over the next few years, she had a number of roles on both Canadian and American TV shows, such as Dark Angel, Mutant X, The Twilight Zone, and The Dead Zone. In 2005, she starred in the sexually explicit art-circuit film Lie with Me, directed by Clement Virgo, and a year later, she held down a part in Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential.
Throughout her filming schedule, Lauren maintained her recurring roles on the CBC’s spy thriller Intelligence and as lesbian sous-chef Lara Perkins on Showtime’s The L Word. In 2007, Lauren kept herself very busy as she worked on a number of films destined for the big screen, including Late Fragment; Normal, with Carrie-Anne Moss; Pathology, starring Heroes’ Milo Ventimiglia; and Trick ‘r Treat, alongside Oscar-winner and fellow Canadian Anna Paquin.
