Reese Witherspoon made her feature debut in Man in the Moon. Starring opposite Sam Waterston, she earned wide critical acclaim as a 1950s tomboy who falls in love for the first time. She followed this performance with a sparkling performance in Jack the Bear as a 12-year-old hippy, circa 1970, opposite Danny DeVito and Gary Sinise. Next, Director Diane Keaton invited Witherspoon to play the lead role in the telefilm, Wildflower, with Patricia Arquette and Beau Bridges. She starred as a 1940s teenager whose sympathy and encouragement changes the life of an epileptic child. Following her performance in the NBC Movie, Desperate Choices: To Save My Child, Witherspoon starred as Nonnie Parker in the Walt Disney motion-picture A Far Off Place. In this film, she embarks on a voyage of self discovery, journeying across Africa's Kalahari Desert. To prepare for the role, she had to perfect the Bushman language by studying with a Matabele tribe. She also starred in the CBS mini-series, Return to Lonesome Dove as the salty Ferris Dunnegan with Jon Voight and Barbara Hershey.

After the great hit of the movie Fear (1996), Reese started to work in a lot of box-office hits, such as Pleasantville (1998) and Cruel Intentions (1999). Her most courageous part came recently when she played Evelyn, the girlfriend of a crazed yuppie, in the horror American Psycho (2000), based on the polemic novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Reese Witherspoon is married to actor Ryan Phillippe and has started a family.

Personal quote (on the break-up scene she had to do with Ryan Phillippe in Cruel Intentions): "I literally beat him up when we had to do the breakup scene. We'd gotten so tired and we'd done the scene so many times. He was off camera giving me my lines and he started to ad lib - which is a bad thing when you're doing this kind of scene, and talking like, 'I never loved you! You're not attractive!' Terrible things. I got upset. I just hauled off and socked him in the face. And everybody in the crew was like 'Gasp! Can you believe she did that?' And I'm screaming my lines and I just yelled 'Get out!' And then he ran off and threw up in a stairwell. And I'm, like, sobbing, saying, 'I can't believe he said those things to me!' And the director came in and said 'Oh God, I can't believe it, that was so great! Can you do it again?'"