Maria Bello: Click Here For Maria's Filmography

Anyway, to move along here…they are not the same person.

Born Maria Elana Bello on April 18 1967 and raised in Norristown, Pennsylvania and grew up without ever believing she would run off to Hollywood to become an actress. She had her eyes on a career as a lawyer. She attended Villanova University where she majored in Political Science.

Of course, as we all know, University is where you are supposed to experiment and experiment Maria Bello did. She found herself taking an acting class in her senior year for fun. A smart thing, after all lawyers have to know how to stand and present in front of a jury which is really just a selective audience, right?

Turns out Maria was good, and not only was she good, she liked it. She became more involved in the theatre and was soon performing such off-Broadway plays as The Killer Inside Me and Urban Planning. T.V. appearances followed on such shows as The Commish and Due South.

With her resume getting fatter she landed her first big break from producers Kenny Lenhart and John Sakmar when they cast her in Mr and Mrs. Smith. This duo had produced an earlier show called 77 Sunset Strip (a remake) that never took off. Maria had played a role on this show and the producers recalled her performance and offered her Mr. And Mrs. Smith. While the Smith spy show lasted a mere eight weeks, the short stint landed her bigger projects. A role on E.R. as Dr. Anna Del Amico for three episodes would bring her more exposure than she had ever had before.

That is until she hit the world of feature films. Her first flick with Ben Stiller and Liz Hurley was the dark bio-pic Permanent Midnight, a art-house flick that failed to set the box-office on fire. Her next film though featured some big Hollywood names and was a box-office hit as well. Cast opposite Mel Gibson in Payback in 1999, she managed to parlay this into a hefty role in 2000 as Lil in Coyote Ugly, another box-office hit.

Films like Duet (Gwyneth Paltrow) and China: The Panda Adventure shared the same fate as Permanent Midnight but in 2002 Bello has a few more flicks likely to garner her some attention and some decent box-office bucks. There is her role as Patricia Crane, Bob Crane's (Greg Kinnear) second wife in Auto Focus. She also appears opposite William H. Macy and Alec Baldwin in The Cooler and finally she has a leading role in the dark comedy The 100 Mile Rule.

Now hopefully, having written this biography, I will never confuse her with Mary McCormack again.Copyright© DVDwolf.com
Copyright© Staffwriter: Rob Paul