Zooey Deschanel

Zooey Claire Deschanel (born January 17, 1980) is an American actress, musician and singer-songwriter. Deschanel made her film debut in 1999's Mumford and soon became known for memorable, deadpan supporting roles in films such as Almost Famous (2000) and The New Guy (2002). She then began playing lead roles in films, including All the Real Girls (2003), Elf (2003), Winter Passing (2005), The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (2005), Failure to Launch (2006), Tin Man (2007), The Happening (2008), Yes Man (2008), and 500 Days of Summer (2009).


Since 2001, Deschanel has performed in the jazz cabaret act If All the Stars Were Pretty Babies with fellow actress Samantha Shelton. She plays keyboards, percussion, banjo and ukulele. She has sung in several of her films, and her debut album Volume One (recorded with M. Ward under the moniker She & Him) was released on March 18, 2008.

Zooey (pronounced /ˈzoʊiː/) Deschanel was born in Los Angeles, California, and is the daughter of Academy Award-nominated cinematographer and director Caleb Deschanel and actress Mary Jo Deschanel (née Weir). She is of Irish and French descent.^[2] She was named after Zooey Glass, the male protagonist of J. D. Salinger's 1961 novella Franny and Zooey.^[3] Her older sister Emily Deschanel is also an actress and stars in the TV series Bones.

Deschanel lived in Los Angeles, but spent much of her childhood traveling because her father shot films on location; she later said that she "hated all the traveling[...]I'm really happy now that I had the experience, but at the time I was just so miserable to have to leave my friends in Los Angeles and go to places where they didn't have any food I liked or things I was used to." She attended Crossroads, a private preparatory school in Santa Monica, California, where she befriended future co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Kate Hudson. She also attended the French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts summer camp and sang throughout high school, planning to pursue a career in musical theatre. She attended Northwestern University for seven months before dropping out to work as an actress.