Twilight’s female love interest (both on and off screen if rumours of a romance with Robert Pattinson are to be believed) 18-year-old Kristen Stewart was first spotted by an agent at the age of eight when she starred in her elementary school’s Christmas play.
Kristen was born and raised in Los Angeles by her father - an American stage manager and TV producer - and script-supervisor mother.
She had brief cameos in a number of movies - such as Disney’s The Thirteenth Year; The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas - before getting her big break playing Jodie Foster’s daughter in David Fincher’s 2002 thriller Panic Room.
She followed that up by playing the daughter of Dennis Quaid and Sharon Stone in another suspenseful project, Mike Figgis’ Cold Creek Manor, and got her first starring role as Maddy Phillips in 2004 children’s action-comedy Mission Without Permission.
Also released the same year was TV film Speak, based on the novel by Laurie Halse Anderson about a high school freshman who is raped, which earned the young actress some of the best notices of her career thus far.
Other film credits include the lead role of Jess Solomon in the supernatural thriller The Messengers and In The Land Of Women alongside Adam Brody and Meg Ryan (both 2005) Sean Penn’s Into The Wild (2007) and 2008 Hollywood satire What Just Happened.
In 2007 Kristen was cast as vampire Edward Cullen’s girlfriend, the dreamily romantic Bella Swan, after an impromptu screen test on the set of indie comedy drama Adventureland by Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke, who said she was "captivated".
She picked up the MTV Movie Award for Best Female Performance for her role in Twilight which she reprises in New Moon.
Since the phenomenal success of Twilight she has been constantly linked with co-star Robert Pattinson with “are they or aren’t they?” dating rumours going into overdrive during the shooting of New Moon.
Currently based in Los Angeles, Kristen has said her ambition is to go to college and become a writer, and she has also expressed a desire to live and work in her mother’s homeland, Australia.
Forthcoming film projects include prison drama K-11, written by her mother and starring Twilight co-star Nikki Reed, as well as starring as Joan Jett in a biopic of all-girl rock group The Runaways.
