Date of Birth : May 21st 1974
Fairuza Alejandra Balk is known for her role in the 1996 movie The Craft, the 1998 movie The Waterboy and, more than ten years earlier, in Disney’s 1985 Return to Oz. Balk was born as Fairuza Alejandra Feldthouse in Point Reyes, California. Her mother, Cathryn Balk, is of Dutch descent and worked as a belly dancer and teacher of Middle Eastern and Flamenco dancing. Her father, Solomon Feldthouse, is a traveling folk musician who was born in Pingry, Idaho and moved to Turkey at the age of ten, where he lived for six years and learned Greek, Turkish and Persian music. When she was eleven, they moved to London, where she attended various prestigious ballet and acting schools.
It was in London that she was selected by the Walt Disney Company to star in Return to Oz, the loose sequel to 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. It was not her first role (that was a television movie called The Best Christmas Pageant Ever made in 1983), but it was the one that brought her attention as an actress. The role led to other minor roles, and eventually she was cast in a lead role in The Craft, in which her character forms a teenage coven with characters portrayed by Neve Campbell, Rachel True and Robin Tunney.
Balk lives in Venice, California, and has an apartment in New York City. Outside her career, her interests include writing poetry and fiction, playing guitar, singing, and dancing. Over the years she has been romantically involved with a number of well known men including British actor David Thewlis who appeared with her in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996). Balk belly dances, as demonstrated in the movie The Island of Dr. Moreau. Her nickname is Ru. Her favorite authors include: William Burroughs, James Joyce, Isabel Allende, Mikhail Bulgakov, Oscar Wilde, and recently Ernest Hemingway and Balzac.