Natasha Gregson Wagner

In therapy since her mother Natalie Wood's tragic death when she was 11, seemingly cute-as-a-button Natasha Gregson Wagner has opted for complicated female characters in dark, offbeat films because they are "more like myself."

The daughter of producer-writer Richard Gregson and adopted daughter of actor Robert Wagner, the lovely dark-haired actress brings to mind her mother at a similar age. She made her feature debut in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (1992) and has also appeared in "Fathers and Sons" (1994), her then-boyfriend Josh Evans' directorial debut "Inside the Goldmine" (1994))--she would later appear in Evan's grim noir "Glam" (2001)--and "High School High" (1996).

In David Lynch's "Lost Highway" (1997), she breathed life into Sheila, the two-timed girlfriend of Balthazar Getty, and in a more central role in James Toback's "Two Girls and Guys" (1998) played the scrappy, streetwise Lou, giving a performance that was magnetic and interesting in a picture that didn't quite deliver on its potential as a great sex farce. She followed an even more adventurously sexual role, frequently minus any clothing, in the unusual "First Love, Last Rites" (1997) opposite Giovanni Ribisi as a couple who spends much of the film either talking endlessly about their relationship or engaging in sex.

After well-received roles in indie features such as writer-director George Hickenlooper's "Dogtown" and "Another Day in Paradise" (1998)--where she played the distaff half of a young couple of drug addicts/thieves taken under the wings of more experienced operators (James Woods and Melanie Griffith), Wagner went mainstream with supporting turns in such films as a college student-slasher victim in the "Scream"-inspired horror flick "Urban Legends" (1998), as Hugh Hefner's ill-fated assistant Bobbie Arnstein in the TV biopic "Hefner Unauthorized" (1999), in the little-seen thriller "Stranger Than Fiction" (1999), as one of John Cusack's many bedeviling women in "High Fidelity" (2000), and the John Carpenter-produced horror sequel "Vampires: Los Muertos" (2002), as well as Tv spots as a regular on the Mike White-penned, short-lived soap opera "Pasadena" (Fox, 2001) and the equally brief small screen version of Jake Kasdan's "The Zero Effect" (2002) . Wagner would continue to land leading roles in avant-garde indies such as "Wishing Time" (2003) as well as appearing in the ensembles of films such as "Wonderland" (2003), the dazzling but unsatisfying depiction of Los Angeles' real-life Wonderland Avenue murders of 1981 which involved porn legend John Holmes; Wagner played a small but winning part as Barbara Richardson, arguably the most innocent of the four murder victims.