Random Things You Didn't Know About Nostalgic 'It Girls' (14 items)

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  (#3) Halle Berry

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  Halle Berry was a rising star in the '90s, and if that feels like yesterday, it's probably because she hasn't seemed to age since then. Her memorable acceptance speech in 2002, after becoming the first Black woman to win the Best Actress Award (for Monster's Ball), is legendary Oscar history. But when she earned a Razzie Award a few years later, she managed to make losing look cool.

  Catwoman came out in 2004 and was a huge bust both critically and commercially. Berry later said that she agreed to be the character after a spin-off film for her Bond character, Jinx, was nixed, and she hoped to show that Black women could be action stars and superheroes. The film received multiple Razzies, including "Worst Actress" for Berry.

  While a lot of actors aren't champing at the bit to publicly accept an award for being terrible, Berry was game. She attended the "ceremony" and gave a bitingly funny acceptance speech where she parodied her tearful Academy Award moment and got in on the joke:

  I’ve got so many people to thank, because you don’t win a Razzie without a lot of help from a lot of people... First of all I want to thank Warner Brothers. Thank you for putting me in a piece of sh*t God-awful movie. You know, it was just what my career needed. I was at the top and then Catwoman just plummeted me to the bottom. It’s hard being on top, it’s much better being on the bottom...

  When I was a kid my mother told me that if you could not be a good loser then there’s no way you could be a good winner. If you couldn’t take criticism, then you were not worthy of getting praised. So I ventured into my career of acting; I started off in beauty pageants... and I won the first three in a row... I got to the Miss USA pageant and there I was on the stage with the first runner up... and one of us would win. And she was this buxom, blond, blue-eyed Texan. And I looked her and I thought "Oh God, I’m probably going to lose."

  Sure enough, they called the winner. It wasn’t me; it was her. I looked at her and all I could hear was my mother’s voice in my head, and I thought, "OK, here’s my chance." But all I wanted to do was f*cking slap the sh*t out of her. So, as you can imagine, I want to f*cking slap the sh*t out of these Razzie people that brought me here tonight. But I won’t do that. I’ll do what my mother taught me and I’ll stand here graciously. I’ll take the criticism, take it as a lesson learned, and hope to God I never see these people ever again.
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  (#11) Janet Jackson

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  Carrie-Ann Moss had breakout success from her role as Trinity in The Matrix. But she reportedly wasn't the first pick for the part. The Wachowskis were in talks with Janet Jackson to play Neo's love interest, another fierce and leather-loving lady. Discussing her interest in the role, Jackson said:

  I want to kick somebody's *ss. Anybody's. As long as I get to kick somebody's *ss. Kick a new hole in their butt. Rip 'em a new butthole. I'd love to do that.

  And we would have loved to watch her, but Jackson had a lot going on and wasn't able to take the part due to scheduling conflicts. Her film career never quite took off in the way the sci-fi franchise did - a glitch in the matrix if ever there was one.
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  (#6) Brandy Norwood

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  Perhaps the only time prom has ever lived up to the hype was in 1996 at Lower Merion High in Philadelphia, where prom-goers were blessed with the presence of Cinderella herself, star of Moesha, no-last-name-needed Brandy, who was 17 at the time. Oh, and her date was a young man by the name of Kobe Bryant.

  Cued up to become the next big thing in basketball, Bryant was a 17-year-old senior when he met Brandy Norwood at the Essence Awards in New York City. At the time, Brandy had already released her first album, toured with Boyz II Men, and was starring on the popular sitcom Moesha.

  Smitten with her kindness, beauty, and intelligence, Bryant later reached out to see if she would go to prom with him, which Brandy agreed to, assuming she could convince her mother, Sonja, to let her attend a dance across the country with a boy she didn't know. A former classmate of Bryant's recalls:

  We were in English class together, and he had one of those teen magazines and it had a picture of Brandy... He showed me and he said, "I'm gonna bring this girl to prom." And I was like, "Whatever, you're crazy." Every day, he would be like "I'm bringing this girl to prom."

  Brandy and her mother ended up flying to Philadelphia, where Brandy, who had a private tutor, got to have the quintessential high school experience, dancing the night away with her peers. She said she kissed Bryant twice, and the pair continued a friendship after prom. Still, conflicting schedules made it hard to take the relationship to a "The Boy Is Mine" level, and Bryant ended up meeting his future wife, Vanessa, in 1999. 
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  (#8) Brooke Shields

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  Princeton graduate and official queen of the bold brow, Brooke Shields traced her ancestry on an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? to reveal she's actually royally connected. She explored the rags-to-riches story of her ancestors on her father's side, the Torlonia family.

  The Torlonias, part of the Italian aristocracy, were a wealthy banking family that did finances for the Vatican. Giovanni Torlonia found success as a merchant in Rome and was "adopted" into Italian royalty, despite the fact that he was actually French.

  Never fear though - Shields is also connected to French and English royalty. She's a descendant of King Henry IV of France and is Queen Elizabeth II's 18th cousin once removed. It's unclear if she's been invited to tea.
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  (#1) Liv Tyler

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  Some girls dream of having a rockstar father, but Liv Tyler ended up growing up with two. Liv Tyler's mother, Bebe Buell, was a singer and Playboy model who had a brief fling with Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler in 1976. Liv was born the following year.

  While she knew there was a chance Steven was the father of her daughter, Buell named her boyfriend, Utopia singer Todd Rundgren, as the father on the birth certificate. Buell was concerned about Steven's drug use at the time, and said that she and Rundgren "made a pact that he would be Liv's father and if it ever became an issue, we'd tell her at 18."

  But it didn't take Liv that long to connect the dots. She recalls meeting Steven at Rundgren's concert around age 8 or 9, where he bought her a Shirley Temple:

  It must be chemical somehow - DNA and genes... I felt a connection in a very strong way when I met him as a little girl and I didn’t know why at first, but I figured it out rather quickly.

  Liv eventually confronted her mother and discovered Steven was her biological father. She later changed her last name from Rundgren to Tyler and appeared in an Aerosmith music video along with Alicia Silverstone. Aerosmith later debuted their hit "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" for her film Armageddon.

  While Buell and Rundgren later broke up, Liv still counts Rundgren among her "eclectic mix of parental figures." As she put it, "I’m so grateful to Todd for choosing to be a father figure to me. It's a big thing for a man to say, 'I know this kid might not be mine, but I still want to be her father.'"
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  (#10) Kate Moss

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  Before Kate Moss became "The Face" of the '90s fashion industry, she was just a girl, standing in front of the counter at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, as her father argued with airline personnel about their repeatedly delayed flight. Meanwhile, Sarah Doukas, who had recently started her own modeling agency, was on her way back to England from a scouting trip. According to Doukas, she was always on the lookout for who might be the next big thing: "Wherever I was going, I was looking. I found a great girl outside a garage in Battersby, in her school uniform."

  The model-hunter spotted 14-year-old Moss before their flight. On the plane, she rushed over to talk to her as soon as the seatbelt sign switched off. The next day, despite her initial reluctance, Moss's mother Linda accompanied her daughter to a meeting at Storm agency.

  Doukas and Moss didn't find immediate success together. While their chance encounter occurred in 1988, Moss's career didn't pick up steam until the mid-'90s. At 5 feet, 7 inches tall, Moss was shorter than typical for the modeling industry, and her "waifish" look didn't fit with the curvier supermodels of the time. "Nobody was interested," Doukas recalled. Eventually, though, Moss left school and committed full-time to modeling.

  While Doukas certainly had an eye, even she couldn't have guessed just how famous Moss would become. "Every day I said, 'I'm going to make you a star.' I didn't know I was going to make her a superstar."

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