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Bianca Kajlich

Bianca Kajlich took an unusual route to the screen. Born in Seattle on March 26, 1977, she began her professional career as a ballet dancer with the Olympic Ballet Theater in Edmonds, Washington. During seven years with the company, she performed lead roles in The River, Swan Lake and The Nutcracker before deciding to try acting. Her first acting job was an advertisement for Kragen Auto Parts, but film and television soon gave her a wider range of parts. Her movie appearances include 10 Things I Hate About You, Bring It On, Halloween: Resurrection and 30 Minutes or Less—a group of films that moves from teen comedy and horror to fast-paced crime comedy. Television has provided the longer thread through Kajlich’s career. She played recurring characters Lisa Grier in Boston Public and Natasha Kelly in Dawson’s Creek, and later took roles in Rock Me Baby and the drama Vanished. She also made guest appearances that allowed her to shift tone quickly: a punk, nose-piercing character in Freaks and Geeks, Bree in the action series Fastlane, and a psychic FBI agent with more to her story in the Psych episode “Psy vs. Psy.” Kajlich became a familiar sitcom presence as Jennifer on Rules of Engagement. She later joined the main cast of NBC’s Undateable, which ran from 2014 to 2016. In 2017, she appeared in Curb Your Enthusiasm as Paula, a woman who receives sartorial advice from Larry David. She also played Christina Henry in Amazon Prime’s Bosch, connecting her television work to the series’ darker crime-drama world. Across comedy, drama, horror and procedural television, Kajlich has avoided being confined to one kind of role. Her background in ballet gives the career an especially interesting starting point: years of disciplined stage performance followed by a screen career defined by its willingness to change genres.