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Alyssa Milano has had a varied and colorful career, especially for a young woman still in her twenties. Starting out on stage in award-winning plays, she jumped to television where she portrayed the sweetest girl in town, and then finally she moved on to the vixen roles for which she has become best known. Alyssa Jayne Milano was born December 19th, 1972 in Brooklyn, New York. Alyssa had a pretty normal childhood until the age of seven. After seeing the Broadway play Annie with her parents, she decided that she wanted to be an actress. By the age of eight, she debuted in the role of July in the Tony-Award winning musical of the same name. A year later, she appeared off-Broadway in Jane Eyre, and after that in the one-act play Tender Offer, among others. In 1984, at the age of twelve, she moved on to television. Alyssa played the role of Tony Danza's daughter Samantha Micelli for eight years on Who's The Boss. Her role as the sweet, intelligent teenaged daughter (every parents dream), garnered her the Youth In Film Award for Best Supporting Actress three times. Alyssa has participated in many movies over the years. The first, when she was only ten years old, was Old Enough with Danny Aiello. Her second performance was opposite a much ‘bigger’ star - Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. In Commando, Alyssa played Arnie's kidnaped daughter, who he must rescue from the clutches of some real villains. A little known fact about Alyssa is her music career. While she was a budding television star over here, her music was taking off in Japan. She recorded five albums in total and every single one went platinum. One of her concerts even attracted a crowd of 40,000 people! After Who's The Boss came to an end, Alyssa slowly disappeared from the public eye. Except for a few roles in TV movies, no one saw her anymore. America had lost its taste for the too-sweet-to-be-true Samantha. Then two things happened that changed the downward course of her career. With the urging of her boyfriend at the time, Alyssa got herself breast implants. The boyfriend didn't last but the implants did. After the operation, she fit a certain image and had the chance to sink her teeth into some juicier roles. Alyssa’s breakthrough at that point was to play the sexual predator in Casualty Of Love (The Amy Fisher Story). Suddenly, rather than being limited to the "good-girl" roles, she could play more diverse characters. For a while, Milano played almost exclusively in straight-to-video titles. While all of these movies had one thing in common - her exposed breasts - she brought a certain seriousness and talent to roles that otherwise would have been pure soft-core pornography. One of her movies, Embrace of The Vampire, had Alyssa nearly naked during half of the movie. It was the story of a vampire who must seduce a virginal girl (Milano) before the week is up or perish forever. The high level of campiness, along with Milano's ever-present naked body, have made this ne somewhat of a cult classic. Another fan favorite is Poison Ivy 2: Lily, about a young girl discovering her sexuality in the worst possible way, and becoming a dangerous force to be reckoned with. More recently, perhaps feeling that she had paid her dues to the “naked-flesh-gods”, Alyssa has begun once again to appear in more mainstream movies where she manages to keep her clothes on. Fear, with Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon, had her playing a girl that was neither all good nor all bad, but somewhere in between. She followed the teen thriller with Glory Daze, a comedic look at college life in the nineties. Below Utopia (Body Count) marked one of the first roles that didn't have her playing a teenager or university student - she had reached adulthood. She also recently spent a season playing with the other tenants on the highly successful television show, Melrose Place. One of her last films points to a bright future. The Hugo Pool, an independent film that has been very well received, may be the break she needs to be considered a serious artist. It seems that she has decided to follow up this trend and is playing more mature characters now. With a new role in the hot new television series, Charmed, under her belt as well, one thing is for sure: we will continue to hear from this talented and resourceful actress.
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