August 30, 1972, in San Diego, California
Cameron Michelle Diaz was born on August 30, 1972, in San Diego, California, and grew up in Long Beach. Her father, Emilio Diaz, worked for the California oil company Unocal, while her mother, Billie, was an import-export agent. Diaz and her older sister Chimene grew up in a household she has described as loving but hardly extravagant, and Cameron developed a decidedly adventurous personality long before Hollywood arrived with trailers, premieres and people whose job is apparently to make sure nobody is holding the wrong handbag.
She attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School, where one of her classmates was future rapper Snoop Dogg. This is one of those pieces of celebrity trivia that sounds as though somebody invented it during a particularly imaginative pub quiz, but both stars have discussed attending school together.
Diaz didn't initially set out to become an actress. At 16, she signed with Elite Model Management and began a successful modeling career that took her around the world. She worked in places including Japan, Australia and Europe and appeared in advertising campaigns for major companies. Modeling provided a remarkably early introduction to international travel and the entertainment business, although nothing she had done quite prepared her for what happened when she auditioned for a movie at 21.
That movie was The Mask.
Diaz had no substantial acting experience when she auditioned for the role of nightclub singer Tina Carlyle opposite Jim Carrey. She reportedly auditioned repeatedly before winning the part, then undertook acting lessons as production approached. It was not exactly the traditional progression of drama school, regional theater, minor television role and eventually Hollywood. Diaz essentially walked into one of the biggest movies of 1994 and hoped everybody would remain calm.
They did not remain calm.
The Mask, based on the Dark Horse Comics character, became an enormous commercial success. Carrey's manic performance as Stanley Ipkiss dominated the movie, but Diaz's screen debut immediately attracted attention. Her entrance as Tina Carlyle, arriving at a bank in a striking red dress, became one of the defining star-making introductions of 1990s cinema.
The film turned Diaz into a recognizable Hollywood actress almost overnight. Rather than immediately chasing another giant studio production, however, she spent the next several years appearing in smaller projects and developing her acting experience. Her films included The Last Supper, Feeling Minnesota, She's the One and Head Above Water. It was a sensible way to learn the profession after beginning at approximately the point where most actors hope to arrive after ten years.
In 1997, Diaz scored another major commercial success with My Best Friend's Wedding, starring Julia Roberts, Dermot Mulroney and Rupert Everett. Diaz played Kimberly Wallace, the cheerful young woman engaged to the man Roberts' character suddenly realizes she wants for herself.
The role could easily have become an irritating obstacle standing between the audience and the romantic leads. Instead, Diaz made Kimberly so sweet, enthusiastic and fundamentally decent that sabotaging her happiness became increasingly uncomfortable. Her hilariously dreadful karaoke performance of "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" was particularly memorable. Kimberly couldn't sing, but she could apparently survive public musical catastrophe with considerably more dignity than most of us manage when dropping something in a supermarket.
Then came the movie that transformed Diaz from successful actress into one of Hollywood's biggest comedy stars.
The Farrelly brothers' There's Something About Mary arrived in 1998. Diaz played Mary Jensen, the woman Ben Stiller's painfully awkward Ted Stroehmann has never forgotten after their disastrous high-school prom date ends before it properly begins. Years later, Ted hires a private investigator, played by Matt Dillon, to find Mary, only for the investigator to fall for her himself.
The film combined romantic comedy with spectacularly inappropriate humor, physical comedy and several scenes that entered popular culture almost immediately. One involving an unfortunate misunderstanding over hair styling products probably requires no further explanation for anybody who has seen the movie. Anyone who hasn't seen it may wish to retain their innocence.
Diaz's performance was crucial because Mary had to remain believable and likable while increasingly ridiculous men competed for her attention. She brought warmth and comic timing to the character without allowing Mary to become merely the beautiful prize at the center of the story.
There's Something About Mary became one of the biggest comedy hits of the decade and earned Diaz her first Golden Globe nomination, for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. It established her as a performer capable of doing something deceptively difficult: being glamorous while having absolutely no objection to looking ridiculous when the joke required it.
Diaz immediately demonstrated that she wasn't interested in staying exclusively within romantic comedy. In 1999, she appeared in Spike Jonze's wonderfully strange Being John Malkovich, written by Charlie Kaufman. Diaz played Lotte Schwartz, the frizzy-haired, somewhat dowdy wife of John Cusack's struggling puppeteer.
The role deliberately stripped away much of the glamorous image Hollywood had built around her. Lotte becomes involved in the bizarre discovery of a portal leading into actor John Malkovich's mind and undergoes an increasingly complicated exploration of identity and desire.
Diaz's performance earned critical acclaim and another Golden Globe nomination, this time for Best Supporting Actress. She also received Screen Actors Guild and BAFTA recognition. For an actress who had entered the profession only five years earlier without significant acting experience, she was accumulating evidence rather quickly that The Mask hadn't simply been an extraordinarily fortunate accident.
In 1999 she also appeared in Oliver Stone's football drama Any Given Sunday, playing Christina Pagniacci, the ambitious owner of the fictional Miami Sharks. Surrounded by performers including Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx, Dennis Quaid and James Woods, Diaz portrayed a hard-driving executive determined to modernize the team despite resistance from Pacino's veteran coach.
The following year brought another blockbuster franchise. Diaz joined Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu in Charlie's Angels, the 2000 big-screen adaptation of the 1970s television series. Diaz played Natalie Cook, one of three highly skilled private investigators working for the mysterious Charlie Townsend.
The film mixed action, comedy, martial arts and an impressive quantity of hair moving dramatically in slow motion. Diaz, Barrymore and Liu developed a lively chemistry, and the movie became a major international success. Diaz returned for the 2003 sequel Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.
Her comedy talents were also put to unusual use in 2001 when audiences heard rather than saw her in Shrek. Diaz voiced Princess Fiona, initially presented as the familiar fairy-tale princess waiting to be rescued from a tower. It gradually becomes clear that Fiona has a secret: every night she transforms into an ogre.
The DreamWorks animated film gleefully dismantled fairy-tale conventions and became a phenomenon. Mike Myers voiced Shrek, Eddie Murphy played Donkey and John Lithgow voiced the diminutive Lord Farquaad. Diaz gave Fiona a combination of fairy-tale elegance, comic energy and surprising toughness.
Shrek won the first Academy Award presented for Best Animated Feature and launched one of DreamWorks Animation's most successful franchises. Diaz returned as Fiona in Shrek 2, Shrek the Third and Shrek Forever After, as well as related shorts and specials.
The same year as Shrek, Diaz appeared opposite Tom Cruise in Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky. Her performance as Julie Gianni, whose relationship with Cruise's character turns dangerously obsessive, provided another reminder that Diaz's sunny comic persona could conceal something considerably darker. The role earned her another Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
In 2002, Martin Scorsese cast her opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York. Diaz played Jenny Everdeane, a pickpocket navigating the violent world of New York's Five Points during the 1860s. The sprawling historical drama received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and gave Diaz an opportunity to work in a very different style from the contemporary comedies that had made her famous.
She continued alternating comedy with drama throughout the 2000s. In In Her Shoes she starred opposite Toni Collette as Maggie Feller, one of two very different sisters whose troubled relationship drives the film. Shirley MacLaine played their grandmother. The movie allowed Diaz to combine her comic instincts with a more vulnerable dramatic performance.
In 2006 she starred with Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Jack Black in Nancy Meyers' The Holiday. Diaz played Amanda Woods, a successful Los Angeles movie-trailer producer who exchanges homes with Winslet's character for Christmas after both women experience romantic disappointments.
The film became an enduring seasonal favorite. Every December, millions of viewers apparently rediscover the important Christmas lesson that emotional difficulties can sometimes be resolved by exchanging houses with a stranger on another continent and discovering that Jude Law lives nearby.
Diaz's later films included What Happens in Vegas with Ashton Kutcher, My Sister's Keeper, Knight and Day with Tom Cruise, The Green Hornet, Bad Teacher, What to Expect When You're Expecting, The Counselor and The Other Woman.
Bad Teacher, released in 2011, gave Diaz one of her most gleefully unsympathetic comic roles. She played Elizabeth Halsey, a foul-mouthed, irresponsible teacher whose professional priorities include doing as little teaching as possible. The film reunited her with Justin Timberlake and became another commercial success.
By the early 2010s, Diaz had become one of Hollywood's most commercially successful actresses. Her movies had collectively earned billions of dollars worldwide, and she had demonstrated an unusual ability to move between broad comedy, romantic comedy, drama, action and animation.
Then she stopped.
After appearing as Miss Hannigan in the 2014 film adaptation of Annie, Diaz stepped away from acting. There wasn't a dramatic Hollywood farewell tour or a final performance announced with orchestral music. She simply reached a point where she no longer wanted her life dominated by the demands of filmmaking.
Diaz later explained that acting at that level required surrendering enormous portions of her life to the machinery surrounding a movie career. Productions, travel, publicity and schedules consumed years, and she wanted to regain control of her own time.
Her priorities changed significantly during her years away from Hollywood. Diaz married musician Benji Madden of Good Charlotte in January 2015. The couple subsequently became parents, welcoming daughter Raddix in 2019 and announcing the birth of their son, Cardinal, in 2024.
She also became an author. The Body Book, published in 2013, examined health, nutrition and the human body, while The Longevity Book followed in 2016 with a discussion of aging. Both reflected interests Diaz had developed beyond acting and celebrity.
For several years, she appeared perfectly content to leave Hollywood behind. In 2018, during a conversation with fellow actresses Selma Blair and Christina Applegate, Diaz jokingly described herself as "actually retired." Considering that she had been one of the industry's most bankable stars, walking away while still in demand was itself an unusual career decision.
But retirement turned out to have an expiration date.
Diaz returned to acting opposite Jamie Foxx in the appropriately titled Netflix action comedy Back in Action. Production began in 2022, and the movie was released in January 2025. Diaz and Foxx played Emily and Matt, former CIA operatives whose quiet family life is disrupted when their identities are exposed.
The title practically wrote the publicity campaign by itself.
The film marked Diaz's first movie role in more than a decade. Rather than presenting the comeback as a return to the relentless career she had deliberately left behind, Diaz described acting again as something she could choose on terms that better suited her life.
Her return did not end with one film. Diaz also became attached to Outcome, a dark comedy directed by Jonah Hill and featuring Keanu Reeves, and to further acting projects. More delightfully for longtime fans, she returned to the recording booth as Princess Fiona for the next installment in the Shrek franchise.
Her comeback adds an interesting final chapter—or perhaps merely the beginning of another chapter—to an already unusual career. Diaz didn't grow up training obsessively to become a movie star. She became a model, auditioned for a movie despite having little acting experience, landed The Mask, became one of Hollywood's biggest stars, earned four Golden Globe nominations, helped launch multiple franchises, walked away at the height of a career many performers would have been terrified to surrender, and eventually returned because she wanted to.
That may be one reason her performances have retained their appeal. Diaz rarely seemed overly protective of being a glamorous movie star. She was willing to make herself ridiculous, unattractive, unpleasant, frightening or completely absurd when the role demanded it. Few performers could move quite so naturally from Being John Malkovich to Charlie's Angels to Shrek without making any of those choices seem especially peculiar.
On August 30, Cameron Diaz celebrates another birthday with a career that has now stretched across more than three decades—although she very sensibly took about ten of those years off.
She danced with Jim Carrey in The Mask, survived Ben Stiller's disastrous courtship in There's Something About Mary, entered John Malkovich's head, fought villains alongside Charlie's Angels, married an ogre, worked with Scorsese, traded houses for Christmas and eventually demonstrated one of Hollywood's rarest superpowers:
She knew when she wanted to leave.
And when she felt like coming back, Hollywood was still waiting.
