Lauren Graham

Lauren Graham is an American actress and writer whose career has been most-defined by her seven-season role as Lorelai Gilmore — alongside Alexis Bledel's Rory — on the WB/CW comedy-drama Gilmore Girls (2000–2007). She was born Lauren Helen Graham on March 16, 1967, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her parents divorced when she was five, and she was raised primarily by her father in suburban Virginia. She earned a Bachelor's degree from Barnard College and a Master of Fine Arts in acting from Southern Methodist University.

Her career-launching role came in 2000 as Lorelai Gilmore on The WB's Gilmore Girls — created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and built around the close mother-daughter relationship between Graham's Lorelai (a single mother running a Connecticut inn) and Bledel's Rory (her ambitious, college-bound teenage daughter). The show ran for seven seasons across 153 episodes. Graham's rapid-fire-dialogue delivery, particularly in the Lorelai-Sookie kitchen exchanges and the Lorelai-Rory mother-daughter sequences, established her as one of the American TV-comedy lead actresses of the 2000s.

The show's 2016 four-part Netflix revival Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life reunited Graham, Bledel, and the entire original cast for a final closure season. The revival's commercial success on Netflix made the original Gilmore Girls one of the streaming-era nostalgic-revival successes.

Beyond Gilmore Girls, Graham has had substantial success on the NBC family drama Parenthood (2010–2015), where she played Sarah Braverman across six seasons and 103 episodes. She has also worked extensively in stage (the 2010 Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls) and film (Bad Santa 2003 and its 2016 sequel, Evan Almighty 2007). She has authored three bestselling memoirs and essay collections — Someday, Someday, Maybe (2013), Talking as Fast as I Can (2016), and In Conclusion, Don't Worry About It (2022). She has been with actor Peter Krause (her Parenthood co-star) since 2010.

Her name Lauren is the feminine form of Lawrence (from the Latin Laurentius meaning "from Laurentum," referring to the laurel-tree-rich ancient Roman city). Lauren has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for decades.