Neve Campbell

Biography

Neve Campbell is a Canadian actress born in Guelph, Ontario, in 1973. Over three decades she has built a career across film and television, and in the late 1990s she became known as a scream queen for her work in horror. Her breakthrough came with the Fox teen drama Party of Five, but her international fame rests largely on Sidney Prescott, the heroine she played throughout the Scream series.

Campbell's early path ran through ballet. She started training at six, after seeing a performance of The Nutcracker, first at the Erinvale School of Dance and later at the National Ballet School of Canada. Repeated injuries pushed her away from dance, and at fifteen she began acting in Toronto, appearing in The Phantom of the Opera while still studying in Guelph. Her first major credit was the lead in the Canadian drama Catwalk (1992-1994). After auditioning in Los Angeles she moved to the United States to play orphan Julia Salinger on Party of Five, a role she held for six seasons.

Her first widely released film was The Craft (1996), a surprise box-office hit. Wes Craven then asked her to audition for Scream, which became a major commercial and critical success. She reprised Sidney in Scream 2, Scream 3 and Scream 4, and critics often praised her straightforward approach to a genre built on irony. Other notable work includes the erotic thriller Wild Things (1998), the drama Panic (2000), and The Company (2003), which she co-wrote, produced and starred in, directed by Robert Altman. In the late 2000s she focused more on television, with The Philanthropist and House of Cards, and later returned to mainstream film with the action thriller Skyscraper (2018).

Today she is best known for the Scream franchise and for her role as Margaret McPherson in Netflix's The Lincoln Lawyer. Her career shows a steady mix of genre films, prestige drama and television, and she remains active across all three.

Key films

• Scream (1996): she plays Sidney Prescott, a teenager who faces a masked killer, the role that made her an international name.
• The Craft (1996): her first widely released film, a box-office hit about a group of teenage witches.
• Wild Things (1998): an erotic thriller in which her ambiguous, calculating character became a talking point of the genre.
• Scream 3 (2000): the third installment of the franchise, in which she reprises Sidney Prescott.
• Skyscraper (2018): an action film that marked her return to big-budget studio work.