Kristin Bauer van Straten

Kristin Bauer van Straten is the American actress who portrays Maleficent on ABC's Once Upon a Time and Once Upon a Time in Wonderland.

Biography
Kristin Neubauer, professionally known as Kristin Bauer van Straten, was born on November 26, 1973 in Racine, Wisconsin to Sara and Ralph Neubauer. She is of German ancestry and has a brother, Jeffrey, who is the president of an industrial packaging business, Kranz Inc., and was a former chairman of the state Democratic Party and an ex-state legislator and a sister, Jill. Kristin graduated from The Prairie School and grew up in Northern Wisconsin surrounded by wildlife and nature.

After high school, she studied fine arts at Washington University in St. Louis and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Berklee College of Music in Boston and later moved to Los Angeles on a whim. Kristin began modeling lingerie for mail-order catalogs and calendars for motorcycle manufacturers, but switched to a serious future in acting.

In 1995, she had her first recurring role in a television series, as Maggie Reynolds on The Crew. Other recurring roles are those of Geneva Renault in Total Security, Candy Cooper in That's Life, Rebecca Colfax in Dirty Sexy Money, and Belinda Slypich in Hidden Hills. Perhaps her best-known film role was in Dancing at the Blue Iguana in 2000. In 2001, she starred in the award winning short film Room 302, and in 2004, she had a minor role in 50 First Dates, starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. In the animated series Justice League, she supplied the voice of the superhero Mera. Kristin is a series regular on HBO's True Blood as vampire Pam.

She has also made a number of guest appearances in several television shows, including LA Law, Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, Dark Angel, Two and a Half Men, Star Trek: Enterprise, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Desperate Housewives, and George Lopez. She famously appeared in a Seinfeld episode, "The Bizarro Jerry", as Gillian, Jerry's girlfriend with "man hands".

In-between acting jobs, Kristin likes professionally draw and paint. She is an environmentalist and activist; working for such causes as the International Fund for Animal Welfare's "Tails for Whales" campaign and donating money to The Best Friends Sanctuary dog rescue. As an advocate against animal cruelty and testing, she joined actor Leonardo DiCaprio for the Animal Legal Defense Fund in freeing Tony, a ten-year-old Siberian-Bengal tiger who has spent every day and night of the last decade caged at the Tiger Truck Stop in Grosse Tête, Louisiana and worked with Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine to promote cosmetics that are not tested on animals.

She met her future husband, Swedish South African-born musician Abri Van Straten, in 2009 after asking him out on a coffee date. Their rapport continued to build over the course of six months, which cumulated with a wedding ceremony on her family's Wisconsin farm in August of the same year.

Trivia

 * Her past odd jobs include working as a window washer, nanny and saleswoman for Herbalife.

Appearances
Note: "Archive" denotes archive footage.