Ali Larter

Info

Full Name: Ali Larter
Date of birth: February 28, 1976 (50 years old)
Location: Cherry Hill, New Jersey
Country: USA
Height: 1,73m

Ali Larter has been active for 27 years, participating in 15 movies that average a 6.1/10 score.

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Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

In November 1996, Esquire ran a cover story on Allegra Coleman, a twenty year old actress about to take over Hollywood, who meditated with Deepak Chopra and had half the industry chasing her. The piece, written by Martha Sherrill, was an invention from top to bottom. Allegra did not exist. The woman in the photographs did, and her name was Ali Larter.

Salon spotted the joke almost immediately, but by then her agent's phone had started ringing and never really stopped. She has summed it up plainly enough since: when a door opens for you in Hollywood, you run through it.

Alison Elizabeth Larter was born on 28 February 1976 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, the daughter of an estate agent and a trucking executive. At fourteen a scout stopped her in the street and she ended up in a Philadelphia Phillies commercial. Ford Models in Manhattan signed her soon after, and she spent her teens living out of a suitcase in Italy, Australia and Japan, where she based herself at seventeen. She never finished her final year of high school.

Those Milan years also gave her a useful friendship with the actress Amy Smart, who would later push her into one particular audition. Before that she chipped away at television, with small parts in 'Suddenly Susan' alongside Brooke Shields, the short lived 'Chicago Sons' and one off episodes of 'Dawson's Creek' and 'Chicago Hope'.

From the catwalk to 'Varsity Blues'

The audition Smart sent her to was 'Varsity Blues' (1999), a high school American football comedy with James Van Der Beek and Paul Walker. Her Darcy Sears turned up wearing a bikini made of whipped cream, an image that followed her around for years and that she now treats as a running joke. The film took more than $50 million in the United States and put her on the map overnight.

A year later came 'Final Destination' (2000) and the scream queen tag that went with it. Clear Rivers, the one survivor who properly works out how the trap operates, became the most popular character in the series and the only reason Larter came back for 'Final Destination 2' (2003). The original made $112 million and started a franchise still going twenty five years on.

That year, 2001, brought three very different films. In 'Legally Blonde', opposite Reese Witherspoon, she was Brooke Taylor Windham, the fitness instructor accused of killing her husband who would rather go to prison than admit she had liposuction. For Kevin Smith she joined the chaos of 'Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back'.

Then she stopped. In 2002 she packed up and left Los Angeles for New York, and she has never dressed up the reason: she was too young and impressionable to handle that kind of pressure. Three years went by with barely a credit. When she came back in 2005 it was with the romantic comedy 'A Lot Like Love', alongside Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet.

Niki, Tracy and Claire Redfield

Her strongest run began in 2006 with 'Heroes', the NBC phenomenon created by Tim Kring. Larter played Niki Sanders first, a Las Vegas mother with enormous strength and an alternate personality called Jessica, and from the third season she played Tracy Strauss, Niki's sister, who could freeze whatever she touched. That came to 55 episodes between 2006 and 2010.

The double role won her a Gracie Award for outstanding supporting actress in a drama in 2008 and a Saturn nomination. Her castmates included Hayden Panettiere, Milo Ventimiglia and Zachary Quinto, on a show that arrived as the television event of its year and then faded season by season. British viewers came to it late: Sci Fi carried it first, and the BBC Two terrestrial premiere in July 2007 turned it into a genuine hit, with the second season pulling in around 3.7 million.

At the same time she became Claire Redfield in Paul W.S. Anderson's video game franchise, working next to Milla Jovovich. Her run covered three instalments, 'Resident Evil: Extinction' (2007), 'Resident Evil: Afterlife' (2010) and 'Resident Evil: The Final Chapter' (2017), which between them took over $750 million.

2007 also left an oddity on her CV. The title role in 'Marigold' took her to India, a Bollywood production opposite Salman Khan in which she played an American actress stranded on a musical shoot, and where the contract obliged her to learn to sing and dance. Two years later came 'Obsessed' (2009), with Larter as the office temp who fixates on the character played by Idris Elba.

Reviewers were rough on the film and kind to her, and the ending turned into a piece of trivia in its own right: the closing brawl with Beyoncé earned them both the MTV Movie Award for Best Fight. It opened at number one in the States with $28 million.

A deliberate pause

She eased off after that, and it was her own call. She had married the actor Hayes MacArthur on 1 August 2009 at his parents' place in Kennebunkport, Maine, having met him on the set of the comedy 'Homo Erectus'. Their son Theodore was born in December 2010 and their daughter Vivienne in January 2015. They are still together.

The years that followed were split between smaller projects and things with nothing to do with film. A cookbook followed in 2013, 'Kitchen Revelry', built around seasonal menus from her own kitchen. Television took her back with the spy series 'Legends' (2014) and 'Pitch' (2016), about the first woman to pitch in Major League Baseball, and later did thirteen episodes of 'The Rookie' as Dr Grace Sawyer.

On screen she was the unreliable friend in 'You're Not You', the motor neurone disease drama led by Hilary Swank, played Matt LeBlanc's love interest in 'Lovesick', and carried the domestic horror of 'The Diabolical' (2015) almost single handed. In 2020, during the pandemic, the family left Los Angeles for Sun Valley, Idaho, where they still live.

Angela Norris changes everything

The turn came in November 2024 with 'Landman', Taylor Sheridan's Paramount+ series about the west Texas oil patch. Larter plays Angela Norris, the ex wife of Billy Bob Thornton's Tommy, a loud, unrepentant character who is a good deal smarter than she lets on.

Getting there was not quick. Sheridan's casting process ran for about three months and ended with a screen test in Fort Worth where she sat in a room with eleven other candidates, all up for the same part. They went out for drinks together afterwards.

It worked straight away. She shares the screen with Demi Moore, Jon Hamm and Michelle Randolph, the second season landed in November 2025, and a third was ordered barely a fortnight later. In 2026 the cast won the Satellite Award for best ensemble in a television series and picked up a SAG nomination in the same category.

She turned fifty in February 2026 and has not been coy about it. Asked on this year's SAG red carpet why it seems so surprising that a woman her age gets a role that sexual, she said there is no expiry date on any of it. After a career of stops and restarts, three years spent deliberately out of the picture and a move to a small town in Idaho, who would have guessed her most talked about part would show up at forty eight?