Ryan Phillippe

Actor

Ryan Phillippe played Billy Douglas on the soap opera One Life to Live, a role usually described with the lengthy honorific of "the first gay teenage character on American daytime TV." Slender and handsome, with copious blonde curls, Phillippe moved to the big screen, landing a co-starring role in the horror flick I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997, with Jennifer Love Hewitt) and then bigger starring roles in 54 (1998, with Neve Campbell), the teenage sex intrigue Cruel Intentions (1999, with Reese Witherspoon), and the gritty The Way of the Gun (2000, with Benicio del Toro). In 2005 he played a troubled Los Angeles cop in the racially-charged drama Crash (with Don Cheadle and Sandra Bullock).

Extra credit: Phillippe married actress Reese Witherspoon in July of 1999. Their daughter Ava was born on 9 September 1999, and their son Deacon was born on 23 October 2003... Philippe and Witherspoon announced in October 2006 that they would formally separate.