Biography of Rachel Bilson

Rachel Sarah Bilson (born August 25, 1981) is an American actress. Born to a California show-business family, Bilson made her television debut in 2003, and then landed the role of Summer Roberts on the prime-time drama series The O.C. Bilson made her movie debut in The Last Kiss (2006) and starred in the science-fiction-action film Jumper (2008) with her then boyfriend Hayden Christensen. From 2011 to 2015, she starred as Dr. Zoe Hart on The CW series Hart of Dixie. In 2018 she starred as Sam Swift on the short lived series Take Two.

Bilson was born in Los Angeles, the daughter of Janice Stango, a sex therapist, and Danny Bilson, a writer, director, and producer. She has an older brother and two younger half-sisters, Rosemary and Hattie. Her mother is an Italian-American who was raised Catholic, and her father is Jewish; she has said that she grew up in a "Chrismukkah household."

Bilson's father comes from a show business family: her paternal grandfather is producer-director Bruce Bilson (b. 1928). Her great-grandfather George Bilson (1902–1981), was born into an Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant family in Leeds, England in the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and worked for RKO Pictures after immigrating to the United States, heading the movie trailer department, and her great-grandmother Hattie Bilson was a screenwriter whose credits include Pal, Canine Detective (1950). Bilson's classmates at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, California, included actress Kirsten Dunst, actor Rami Malek, and American Idol runner-up singer Katharine McPhee.