Cindy Sampson

Cindy Sampson landed her first professional acting job when she was still in high school. That was during the late 1980s, and it took a little more than a decade before her career really started to take off with lots of film roles. In 2006, she landed a co-starring role in the made-for-TV movie "Live Once, Die Twice," which also starred Kellie Martin. Sampson played the woman last seen with Martin's recently-vanished husband, and who holds the secret to where he has disappeared to. That same year, she had a small role in the romantic comedy "The Last Kiss," an American remake of an Italian movie about a commit-phobic young man.

More television work and small films followed, including a part that would become one of Sampson's best known: Lisa Braeden in the action/horror series "Supernatural," whom she began playing on a recurring basis in '07. A beautiful woman and single mother, Lisa enjoys a complicated relationship with Dean Winchester, one of the show's primary characters. Sampson closed out the '00s by co-starring in "High Plains Invaders," a made-for-TV mash-up of Westerns and science-fiction movies that got rated a guilty pleasure by critics. During the early 2010s, she guest-starred in the Canadian fantasy series "Being Human," and also had a supporting role in the thriller "The Factory" starring John Cusack.