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Character actress Sara Paxton debuted on-camera in her mid-teens, in the early 2000s. With bleached-blonde hair and steel-blue eyes that radiated a healthy middle-American appeal, Paxton seemed tailor-made for stardom and drew audience attention within an unsurprisingly brief period of time. However, she also maintained a somewhat low profile for the first several years, in terms of choice of material and narrow genre focus. Paxton premiered cinematically in 2001, with a small role in the Neal Israel-directed, made-for-television family comedy Hounded, and followed it up with similar programmers, such as the antiseptic farces Sleepover (2004), Return to Halloweentown (2006), and Aquamarine (2006). Paxton ascended to much higher billing (and expanded into slightly edgier material) with a plum role in the Amanda Bynes teen comedy Sydney White (2007), about a young sorority pledge who makes an aggressive attempt to rebuild the collegiate social hierarchy. She continued to work regularly in projects such as Superhero Movie, the 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left, and the 2011's The Innkeepers.