Lisa Edelstein

Lisa Edelstein is a veteran of series television who plays Dr. Lisa Cuddy in the medical drama House (starring Hugh Laurie). Born in Boston, she grew up in New Jersey and moved to New York City in the mid-1980s to pursue a career in theater. She found regional fame as a party girl in New York's club scene, which she then parlayed into a career as an actress, first by producing her own stage production about AIDS, Positive Me (1989), then by landing a job as the host of MTV's short-lived daytime show, Awake on the Wild Side (1990, as Lisa E.). Since then she's made a handful of feature films and made her mark as a guest star on some of television's hottest shows. She has played love interests in Seinfeld (opposite Jason Alexander), The West Wing (opposite Rob Lowe) and Boston Legal (opposite James Spader), and had memorable roles in Ally McBeal (1997-2002, starring Calista Flockhart) and Felicity (1998-2002, starring Keri Russell). A brunette and blue-eyed beauty, Edelstein has played a number of sexually-adventurous characters over the years, but in 2004 she settled into the role of a serious hospital administrator in House. Her feature film roles include What Women Want (2000, starring Mel Gibson) and Daddy Day Care (2003, starring Eddie Murphy).

Extra credit: Her last name is pronounced "eddle-steen"... She was the voice of Mercy Graves in the animated series Superman (1996-2000), and has repeated the role in Justice League (2001)... Some sources list her birth year as 1966; she is a 1984 graduate of Wayne Valley High School in Wayne, New Jersey.