Marley Shelton

Marley Eve Shelton was born on April 12, 1974 in Los Angeles, California, to Carol (née Stromme), a teacher and former singer, and Christopher Shelton, a director and producer. The second of four daughters, Shelton's sisters are Koren, Erin and Samantha Shelton, who is also an actress and a musician. Shelton grew up in the residential neighborhood of Eagle Rock, where she attended Eagle Rock High School. She attended University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied film and theatre, and enrolled in acting lessons with Larry Moss and Robert Carnegie, while supporting her career through mainly small parts in film and television in the early 1990s. Shelton eventually dropped out of UCLA when she was cast in a leading role in the 1997 adventure film Warriors of Virtue. Shelton made her on-screen debut as Roberto's girlfriend at camp in Grand Canyon. She subsequently appeared in 1992's television movie Up to No Good playing Denise Harmon, and had several guest-appearances in episodes of shows such as Family Matters, Camp Wilder and Crossroads. Shelton found her profile raised significantly when she appeared in the 1993 film The Sandlot, playing the lifeguard Wendy Peffercorn. The movie received mixed feedback from critics and writers and, budgeted at US$7 million, was a box office success with a worldwide gross of over US$33 million. It has since developed a cult following. In 1994, Shelton had a supporting part in Hercules in the Underworld, the fourth made-for-television movie in the series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. The following year, she was cast in a minor role, as former President Nixon's adult daughter Tricia Nixon Cox, in Oliver Stone's acclaimed film Nixon, and guest-appeared in the television series Cybill episode "The Big Sleep-Over". Shelton next co-starred alongside Lynda Carter in When Friendship Kills (1996), a made-for-television film about anorexia nervosa among teens. 1997 saw Shelton appear in the romantic comedy Trojan War, opposite Jennifer Love Hewitt, and in the fantasy film Warriors of Virtue, as Princess Elysia. Both films rated poorly with reviewers and failed to attract audiences, but James Berardinelli singled out Shelton for her performance in Warriors of Virtue, writing that her character is "the only one in the film that we develop any real interest in, and the script, apparently unable to deal with a personality having the potential to display more than one dimension, discards her perfunctorily and inelegantly".