Arielle Kebbel on AllMovie

The fair-haired, fresh-faced and photogenic Arielle Kebbel lived the dream of many an American teenage girl by traveling the direct, one-shot path from obscurity to an instantly flourishing career. Just after high school, this former victor of teen beauty pageants (and Hollywood hopeful) hit the road with her mom and undertook a cross-country journey in the family car from the Kebbels' hometown of Winter Park, FL, straight to Southern California. In no time at all (reportedly less than one week), Kebbel auditioned for a recurring guest role on the WB's series comedy drama Gilmore Girls -- and was hired immediately by series producers, thus realizing instantly her dreams of becoming a respected Tinseltown actress.

In the popular Gilmore program, Kebbel portrayed Lindsay Lister, the woman who dates, then marries, then divorces small-town hunk Dean Forester (Jared Padalecki). The turn lasted from the midpoint of season three (2003) into the fall of 2004, concluding with the Foresters' estrangement. Kebbel then graduated from the small to the big screen with a series of turns in high-profile but (unfortunately) consistently schlocky and critically maligned Hollywood films. Kebbel traveled as one of the few white passengers on a "jive" purple airplane commandeered by Snoop Dogg in the neo-blaxploitation comedy Soul Plane (2004), then received second billing as one of the busty, "all-American" campers (and the child sweetheart of the lead) in 2005's direct-to-video sexploitationer American Pie Presents: Band Camp.

Kebbel's highest-profile 2006 releases included John Tucker Must Die and The Grudge 2. In the former, she played Carrie, a technology buff who teams up with two female friends to exact a series of nasty paybacks on the high-school heartthrob who cheated on all of them simultaneously. In the latter, a sequel to a 2002 horror picture headlined by Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kebbel falls prey to the infamous curse of Kayako and Toshio, two vengeful Japanese spirits who unleash an irrepressible rage on those humans unfortunate enough to fall into their path.