Age: 39
female
Lea Michele Sarfati (born August 29, 1986) is an American actress, singer, and songwriter. A soprano with a vocal range spanning multiple octaves, she is known for her performances on both screen and stage. Michele has received various accolades, including a Screen Actors Guild Award, along with nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, and two Golden Globe Awards. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in both 2010 and 2023. Born and raised in New York City, Michele is of Italian and Sephardic Jewish descent. She began her career as a child actress on Broadway, appearing in productions of Les Misérables (1995–1996), Ragtime (1997–1999), Fiddler on the Roof (2004–2005), and Spring Awakening (2006–2008). She rose to fame as overachieving high school student Rachel Berry on the Fox musical comedy-drama Glee (2009–2015). Her performance earned critical acclaim, a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series, and nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award and two Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress in a Comedy Series. Along with the cast, Michele received three Grammy Award nominations for music from the series, which also produced multiple Billboard-charting singles. Her portrayal of Berry became a defining role of 2010s television, influencing a generation of young performers and helping to popularize musical television worldwide. Michele made her feature film debut in New Year’s Eve (2011) and signed with Columbia Records in 2012. She released her debut single, “Cannonball,” in 2013, followed by her first studio album Louder (2014), which debuted at number 4 on the Billboard 200. Her subsequent albums include Places (2017), Christmas in the City (2019), and Forever (2021). Known for her expressive, Broadway-trained voice and emotional delivery, Michele has been praised for her ability to blend theatrical performance with contemporary pop sensibilities. She has also authored two books: Brunette Ambition (2014) and You First: Journal Your Way to Your Best Life (2015). In 2022, Michele returned to Broadway to star as Fanny Brice in the revival of Funny Girl, earning widespread acclaim for her performance. She is set to return to the stage in 2025, starring as Florence in the first-ever Broadway revival of Chess, opposite Aaron Tveit and Nicholas Christopher. Following her acclaimed work in Funny Girl, Michele continues to be recognized as one of Broadway’s leading performers of her generation, maintaining an active presence in theater, music, and on screen.
Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel. As Lee soon learns, Ault is a cloistered world of jaded, attractive teenagers who spend summers on Nantucket and speak in their own clever shorthand. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of–and, ultimately, a participant in–their rituals and mores. As a scholarship student, she constantly feels like an outsider and is both drawn to and repelled by other loners. By the time she’s a senior, Lee has created a hard-won place for herself at Ault. But when her behavior takes a self-destructive and highly public turn, her carefully crafted identity within the community is shattered. Ultimately, Lee’s experiences–complicated relationships with teachers; intense friendships with other girls; an all-consuming preoccupation with a classmate who is less than a boyfriend and more than a crush; conflicts with her parents, from whom Lee feels increasingly distant, coalesce into a singular portrait of the painful and thrilling adolescence universal to us all.
