Born: Leighton Marissa Meester
Date of Birth: 9 April 1986
Birth Place: Fort Worth, Texas, USA
Height: 5′ 4½” (1,64 m)
Leighton Marissa Meester (born April 9, 1986) is an American actress, singer and model. She is mostly known for her starring role as Blair Waldorf in the teen drama series Gossip Girl (2007–12). She has also appeared in the 2010 country drama film Country Strong, the 2011 thriller The Roommate, the 2011 romantic-comedy Monte Carlo, the comedies The Oranges (2011) and That’s My Boy (2012), and the comedy-drama The Judge (2014). Meester made her Broadway debut in Of Mice and Men (2014).
In addition to acting, Meester has also ventured into music. In 2009, she featured on Cobra Starship’s “Good Girls Go Bad” which charted on the Billboard Hot 100, and released her first single “Somebody to Love” with Universal Republic. Her second single “Your Love’s a Drug” was released in 2011. Meester has also recorded songs for various soundtracks. Her debut album, Heartstrings, was independently released in 2014. She has also modeled, having been the face of brands such as Jimmy Choo, Herbal Essences and Vera Wang.
Leighton Marissa Meester was born in Fort Worth, Texas, to Constance (Haas) and Douglas Meester. Although born in Texas when her mother was serving a jail sentence for her part in a marijuana-smuggling ring, Meester spent her early years in Marco Island, Florida with her grandparents. There, she became involved with the local playhouse and made her stage debut in a production of “The Wizard of Oz”.
She moved to New York with her mother at the age of 11 and was soon working as a model and appearing in TV commercials. A few years later, at age 14, she and her mother moved again, this time to Los Angeles where she soon began to pick up TV work, making her debut in Law & Order: Disciple (1999).
A steady stream of TV work followed until in 2007 she landed the role in Gossip Girl (2007) which made her famous. This led to more TV and movie work, and in 2009 she launched a recording career with a single entitled, “Somebody to Love”.
Her surname, “Meester”, is Dutch for “master” or “teacher”. Her father is of approximately one quarter German, one quarter Dutch, one quarter Irish, and one quarter English, ancestry. Her maternal grandfather was the son of German immigrants, and her maternal grandmother had English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry.
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