Lisa Edelstein as Lisa Cuddy

Award-winning actress and playwright Lisa Edelstein was born on May 21, 1966 in Boston, Massachusetts to Jewish parents. One of three children, she was raised in Wayne, New Jersey and was later educated at New York University's Tisch School of the Fine Arts. While in New York, she was named as a celebutante by Newsweek magazine, and from then went on to write, compose and star in an original musical entitled Positive Me, which she created to address the 1980s AIDS crisis. In 1990, she briefly hosted MTV's Awake on the Wild Side, after which she appeared on several comedy series such as Mad About You, Wings, The Larry Sanders Show and Seinfeld.

Edelstein's other television credits include ABC's Relativity (1996), The West Wing (1999), Ally McBeal (2000) and Felicity (2001). She also did voice work for animated programs such as King of the Hill, American Dad and Superman: The Animated Series. Moving on to film, she appeared in What Women Want, Keeping the Faith, As Good as it Gets and Daddy Day Care.

In 2004, Edelstein was cast as Dr. Lisa Cuddy in the highly watched FOX series, House, where she worked with British actor, Hugh Laurie.

The TV Tattler spoke with Edelstein about working with Laurie, and she said, "[Laurie]'s a genius. He's extremely hilarious. He's an incredibly hard worker. He impresses me a great deal, and I love working with him. You know, the whole feeling on the set starts at the number one on the call sheet, which would be Hugh Laurie in our case, and he's just a genuinely lovely guy and he's working so hard."

Moreover, in reflecting about her celebutante days, Edelstein said, "I learned a lot from that time about celebrity, and that it's not a goal, that it certainly wasn't a goal that I was interested in and that if I wanted to be an actress because I wanted to be a celebrity, it wasn't a good enough reason. It made me step back and reassess what I was doing. Then, it inspired me to write the musical that I did, to do something that meant something to me."