Cameron Michelle Diaz (born August 30, 1972) is an American actress and former model. She became famous during the 1990s with roles in the movies The Mask, My Best Friend's Wedding, and There's Something About Mary. Other high-profile movie credits include the two Charlie's Angels movies and voicing the character Princess Fiona for the Shrek series. Diaz received Golden Globe award nominations for her performances in the movies There's Something About Mary, Being John Malkovich, Vanilla Sky, and Gangs of New York.
Diaz was born in San Diego, California, the younger daughter of Emilio Diaz (1949–2008), who worked for the California oil company UNOCAL for more than 20 years as a field gauger, and Billie (née Early), an import-export agent. Her father was born in Los Angeles County, and his family came from Spain via Cuba (her paternal grandparents settled in Tampa's Ybor City). Her mother is of English, German, Native American, and Dutch descent.She attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School.
At age 16, she began her career as a fashion model. Diaz contracted with modeling agency Elite Model Management. For the next few years she worked around the world for contracts with major companies. She modeled for designers such as Calvin Klein and Levi's. When she was seventeen years old she was featured on the front cover of the July 1990 issue of the magazine Seventeen.
At age 21, Diaz auditioned for the movie The Mask, even though she had no previous acting experience, based on the recommendation of an agent for Elite who met the film's producers while they were searching for the female main actress. After obtaining the main female role, she immediately started acting lessons. The Mask became one of the top ten highest grossing films of 1994, and earned Diaz nominations for several awards.
During the next three years, she had roles in low-budget independent films, such as The Last Supper (1995), Feeling Minnesota (1996), She's the One (1996), Keys to Tulsa (1996), and A Life Less Ordinary (1997), preferring to feel her way effectively into the business. She was scheduled to feature in the film Mortal Kombat, but had to resign after breaking her hand while training for the role.
She returned to mainstream films with the major movie successes My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) and There's Something About Mary (1998), for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the category of Best Actress — Musical or Comedy. She received critical acclaim for her performance in Being John Malkovich (1999), which earned her Best Supporting Actress nominations at the Golden Globe Award, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG Awards). During 1990–2000, Diaz featured in many movies, such as Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, Very Bad Things, Any Given Sunday, and the successful adaptation of Charlie's Angels. During 2001, she won nominations for Best Supporting Actress for the Golden Globe Awards, the SAG Awards, the Critics' Choice Awards, and the American Film Institute Awards for Vanilla Sky, and also voiced Princess Fiona in the movie Shrek, for which she earned $10 million.
During 2003, Diaz received another Golden Globe nomination for Martin Scorsese's epic Gangs of New York, and became the third actress (after Wedding costar Julia Roberts) to earn $20 million for a role, receiving the sum for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. Her next movies were In Her Shoes (2005), and The Holiday (2006). She was preparing to work again with The Mask co-star Jim Carrey for the film Fun with Dick and Jane, but resigned to feature in In Her Shoes. Diaz reportedly earned $50 million during the period of a year ending June 2008, for her roles in What Happens in Vegas opposite Ashton Kutcher, and the Shrek sequels. In 2009, she starred in My Sister's Keeper and The Box.
