Lindsay Lohan

Lindsay Lohan launched her entertainment career at age three after signing with Ford as a child model, an opportunity that quickly led to television spots promoting the Gap, Pizza Hut, and Wendy’s. Additional small-screen work followed in her youth, encompassing daytime serials such as Another World and The Guiding Light plus appearances in The Bette Show and the Disney Channel feature Get a Clue.

Her longstanding Disney affiliation, underscored by her dual role in the updated Parent Trap, extended through adolescence and opened pathways into music. While sharing the screen with Jamie Lee Curtis in the 2003 comedy Freaky Friday, she also recorded that film’s theme, “Ultimate.”

The year after, she took the lead in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and supplied two tracks for its soundtrack. Capitalizing on those releases and her starring turn in Mean Girls, Lohan emceed the 2004 MTV Movie Awards and collected the Female Breakout Star trophy. She subsequently joined Tommy Mottola’s Casablanca Records roster and issued her first full-length project, Speak, in December 2004.

Public scrutiny intensified during 2005 even as she remained linked to Disney by filming a new version of Herbie: Fully Loaded. Online speculation and tabloid reports circulated about her physical condition, on-again-off-again romance with Wilmer, late-night socializing, and reputed temperament issues, while Speak itself underperformed commercially.

By year’s end, her reputation as a volatile and fragile young celebrity—whether grounded in fact or embellishment—had eclipsed her acting and recording accomplishments. Against that backdrop of relentless media pressure she unveiled her sophomore album, A Little More Personal (Raw). Though reviewers largely dismissed the record, it attained gold status early in 2006.

Universal Music Group later reassigned her from Casablanca to Motown Records. Concentrating primarily on film work throughout 2006 and 2007 amid continuing tabloid scrutiny and public incidents—including an arrest on May 26, 2007, for suspected driving under the influence and a subsequent stay at Promises Treatment Center in Malibu, California—Lohan still intended to begin developing material for a third album in the second half of that year.