A native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and an alumnus of Chicago's Piven Theatre Workshop, stage and screen actress Laurel Holloman made her film debut as one of the eponymous teenagers in Maria Maggenti's The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995). She subsequently found leading and supporting roles in films ranging from Bart Freundlich's The Myth of Fingerprints (1997), in which she played a member of an emotionally dysfunctional family; to Boogie Nights (1997), Gavin O'Connor's Tumbleweeds (1999), and Loving Jezebel (1999), which cast her as the married object of a young man's crush.