Biography of Elisabeth Shue

Elisabeth Judson Shue is an American actress, best known for her starring roles in the films The Karate Kid , Adventures in Babysitting , Cocktail , Back to the Future Part II , Back to the Future Part III , Soapdish , Leaving Las Vegas , The Saint , Hollow Man , and Piranha 3D . She has won several acting awards and has been nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA. She starred as Julie Finlay in the CBS procedural forensics crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation from 2012 to 2015. More recently she had supporting roles in Battle of the Sexes and Death Wish . She was also in the first two seasons of the Amazon series The Boys . During her studies at Columbia High School and after her parents' divorce, Shue began acting in television commercials, becoming a common sight in advertisements for Burger King, also featuring future stars Sarah Michelle Gellar and Lea Thompson , DeBeers diamonds, and Best Foods/Hellmann's mayonnaise. She had small parts, credited as Lisa Shue, in The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana and Somewhere, Tomorrow which provided an early starring role for Sarah Jessica Parker. Shue made her feature film debut in 1984, when she co-starred opposite Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid as Ali Mills, the love interest of Macchio's main character. She was a series regular as the teenage daughter of a military family in the short-lived television series Call to Glory between 1984â€“1985, which she followed in 1986 starring alongside Terence Stamp in the British horror film Link. In 1987 Shue appeared in the television movie Double Switch co-starring with George Newbern, who would go on to support her in her first star vehicle, the hugely popular Adventures in Babysitting in the same year. In 1988 Shue starred in Cocktail as the love interest of Tom Cruise's lead character. The following year she starred in the short "Body Wars" which was used at Epcot in an ATLAS Simulator attraction in the Wonders Of Life Pavilion until 2007. Other roles followed, appearing as Jennifer Parker in Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III , replacing Claudia Wells who declined to reprise the role from Back to the Future because of a family illness. It was around this time her older brother, William, died in an accident on a family holiday. Although her career was on the rise with her playing lead roles, Shue elected to take on the smaller supporting role of Jennifer in these sequels to allow her to deal with her family loss. The sequels were filmed back to back, and she featured prominently in Part II, appearing in bookend pieces in the third part of the trilogy. In May 1990, Shue made her Broadway debut in Some American Abroad at the Lincoln Center. The following year she returned to cinema where she appeared in the comedies The Marrying Man with Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin, and Soapdish with Sally Field, Robert Downey Jr., Kevin Kline and Whoopi Goldberg. Between 1992 and 1994 she appeared in a variety of supporting roles in both film and television. These included the comedy Twenty Bucks reuniting with Christopher Lloyd from Back to the Future, noir thriller The Underneath, a guest appearance in Dream On, and the romantic comedy Heart and Souls reuniting with Robert Downey Jr.. She also returned to Broadway in 1993, performing in Tina Howe's production of Birth and After Birth.