Rachel McAdams

Rachel McAdams is a Canadian actress whose two-decade career has produced multiple 2000s and 2010s American film roles across romantic comedy, drama, and prestige TV. She was born Rachel Anne McAdams on November 17, 1978, in London, Ontario, Canada. She was a competitive figure skater through her teens and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater from York University in Toronto in 2001.

Her American film breakthrough came in 2004 with two supporting and lead roles: Mark Waters's Mean Girls (where she played the high-school queen-bee Regina George — one of the American teen-comedy villain performances of the 2000s) and Nick Cassavetes's The Notebook (where she played the romantic lead Allie Hamilton opposite Ryan Gosling, in the 2004 American romantic-drama adaptation of Nicholas Sparks's 1996 novel). Both films were released within four months of each other and effectively launched her American career.

Her subsequent 2000s and 2010s film career has spanned multiple major roles: Wedding Crashers (2005, opposite Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson), Red Eye (2005), Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009) and the 2011 sequel, the Tom McCarthy ensemble drama Spotlight (2015, where she received her first Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her role as Boston Globe journalist Sacha Pfeiffer in the Catholic-Church-investigation drama), and the Marvel Cinematic Universe role of Christine Palmer across Doctor Strange (2016) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).

McAdams has been notoriously private about her personal life. She has been with American screenwriter Jamie Linden since 2016, and the couple has two children. She has continued to take on selective film and TV roles, including the 2020 HBO limited series True Detective (season 2) and the 2023 indie film Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (her career-celebrated adaptation of the 1970 Judy Blume novel).

Her name Rachel is from the Hebrew Rachel meaning "ewe" (a young female sheep), referring to the Old Testament matriarch Rachel — the second wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph and Benjamin. Rachel has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for decades.