Charlotte Lewis

English actress Charlotte Lewis, who built a career on her exotic good looks, attributes her eye-catching allure to her diverse heritage, which includes Irish, Iraqi and Chilean ties. The raven-haired beauty made her film debut as the enchanting love interest in Roman Polanski's family-friendly adventure "Pirates" in 1986. While this feature was a total flop, failing to impress at the box office or with critics, her next film effort, the Eddie Murphy action-comedy "The Golden Child," yielded better results. Critics loathed the globetrotting adventure in which Lewis played a mysterious love interest, but "The Golden Child" went on to become the eighth most financially successful movie of 1986. Next came the series regular role of psychiatrist Priscilla Maher on the crime drama "Broken Badges," which lasted only eight episodes. After appearing opposite James Spader in the blackmail thriller "Storyville," Lewis posed for a cover-feature pictorial in "Playboy" magazine. The racy pictures gave her career a brief revival, leading to a one-off on the wildly popular sitcom "Seinfeld," a co-starring role in action hero Dolph Lundgren's Special Ops thriller "Men of War," as well as some supporting roles in a string of less memorable thrillers and action films. Not long after co-starring in the music-fueled dramedy "Hey DJ," which was directed by her childhood friend Jon Jacobs, Lewis chose to step out of the spotlight and dedicate herself to raising her newborn son.