Gina Gershon

Gina Gershon

Gina Gershon
Date of Birth
10 June 1962, Los Angeles, California, USA

Birth Name
Gina L. Gershon

Height
5' 6¼" (1.68 m)

Mini Biography

Since making her unaccredited debut as a dancer in Beatlemania (1981) (1981), Gina Gershon has established herself as a character actress and one of the leading icons of American camp. For it was fourteen years after her movie debut that Gina made movie history as the predatory bisexual who was the leading light of a Las Vegas leg-line in director Paul Verhoeven's kitsch classic Showgirls (1995). Exploding out of a plaster-of-paris volcano clad in nothing but body makeup and a G-string, Gina Gershon obtained cinema immortality. After Showgirls (1995), she solidified her reputation playing a lesbian sexpot in the Wachovski Bros' neo-noir Bound (1996).
Of French, Dutch and Russian-Jewish extraction, Gina Gershon was born in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills, the last in a brood of three kids. Raised in the San Fernando Valley, she got the acting bug early, appearing at the age of seven in a school production of Bye Bye Birdie (1963). Because of her acting ambitions, her parents moved to Beverly Hills so Gina could attend Beverly Hills High, where she indulged her acting jones by appearing in a student production of The Music Man (1962). Her first love, she says, is singing.
After graduating from high school in 1980, she attended Emerson College in Boston, but took a part in the musical "Runaways". She transferred to New York University, where her official biography says she studied philosophy and psychology, but she graduated from the Tisch School of the Arts, taking a bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Drama in 1983. In New York City, while perfecting her craft, she co-founded the theater company, Naked Angels, with Helen Slater.
Her big screen breakthrough came with a part in the 1986 "Brat Pack" teenage hit Pretty in Pink (1986). She also had parts in the Tom Cruise vehicle Cocktail (1988) and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Red Heat (1988). Of this period, she says, "One of my first gigs, a movie called Cocktail (1988), I found myself at 8 in the morning, in bed, practically naked, having to make out with Tom Cruise; hmmmm... movie business - so far, so good".
Gershon is versatile, too, as at home on stage as she is in front of the camera. After appearing in off-Broadway and regional theater productions, she made her Broadway debut as a replacement in Sam Mendes' revival of Cabaret (1972) in January 2001. For six months, she played the key role of "Sally Bowles", returning that October to reprise the role for another month. In 2008, she once again appeared on Broadway in the revival of the farce "Boeing Boeing" on Broadway, which won the Tony Award for Best Revival.