Christina Ricci (born February 12, 1980) is an Emmy Award-nominated American actress who first achieved fame for her role as Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family (1991), and its sequel Addams Family Values (1993).
Her movie roles have ranged from art house films such as The Ice Storm (1997), dramas such as Monster (2004), independent comedies such as The Opposite of Sex (1998), for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress, and blockbusters such as Sleepy Hollow (1999).
Ricci endured the transition from a child star to teenage idol and adult actress and currently holds her own production company, Blaspheme Films, responsible for Pumpkin and Prozac Nation. She has recently appeared in Black Snake Moan (2007) and Penelope (2008), and stars as Trixie, the female lead role in the The Wachowski Brothers' feature film adaptation of Speed Racer, in 2008.
Ricci was born in Santa Monica, California, the fourth and youngest child of Sarah (née Murdoch), a former Ford Model and real estate agent, and Ralph Ricci, a lawyer and psychiatrist.[1] Regarding her ancestry, Ricci has stated that "the Italian blood has been bred out of me. There's an Italian four or five generations back who married an Irish woman and they all had sons. So they married more Irish women, there were more sons, and more Irish women. Now I'm basically Scots-Irish."[2]
Her family was reasonably financially comfortable from its inception; her father, before becoming a lawyer, was a psychiatrist who specialized in shrieking therapy. While a child, Christina could hear the therapies through the vents in her room, and would act them out in front of her mother.[3] The family moved to Montclair, New Jersey, where she grew up attending Edgemont Elementary School, Glenfield Middle School, and Montclair High School as well as the Morristown-Beard School.[4] After one year she left the high school for a private school in New York City (the Professional Children's School), which was also attended by various other celebrities such as Sarah Michelle Gellar, Macaulay Culkin, and Jerry O'Connell.[5] Her siblings are Rafael (born 1971), Dante (born 1974), and Pia (born 1976). When her father and her mother eventually separated in 1993, Ricci stayed with her mother, who took custody of the children. Ricci has not spoken to her father since this took place in 1993. Of her siblings, she is closest to her brother Rafael. After her parents' divorce, Ricci experimented with self-injury, and began cutting herself as a child as she felt that she couldn't handle her body developing—Ricci stated that this problem affected her self esteem as a young teenager.[4]