Blake Lively plays Serena van der Woodsen in the hit television show, Gossip Girl. Serena is slim and ethereally beautiful; she is admired by every other girl in the show. She is very intelligent, but she is told often that she is not working to her full potential. She lives in the Upper East Side of Manhattan and comes from a family that is very prominent in New York society. She plays a very modest yet beautiful girl who is sought after by many guys in the show. She is a true romantic and is swept off her feet by Dan Humphrey, the lower middle class classmate from Brooklyn.

The real life of Blake Lively is not that far from the character she portrays on the series. She was born in Tarzana, California and is the youngest of five children. Both her parents were actors and all of her siblings have acted at one point as well. They are a very talented family and are well known in the acting world. Lively did not always want to be an actress though and it was not until later in life that she realized this desire.

As a child she was homeschooled and ironically, one of her home school classmates was actor Penn Badgley, who plays her love interest on the television series. Blake Lively went to Burbank High School in Burbank, California where she was in the National Show Choir. She was very popular in high school, just as she is in Gossip Girl and she was senior class president as well as a cheerleader. All through high school Lively had plans to attend Stanford University, but the summer between her junior and senior year, her brother had his agent send her out on a few auditions. She only went on two auditions, but in one of them she landed her very first acting role as Bridget in the film, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. She actually did very well in her film debut and won a Teen Choice Award nomination for the Choice Movie Breakout Female.

Blake Lively put her college dreams on hold and appeared in movies such as Accepted, Simon Says, and Elvis and Anabelle. She will actually reprise her role as Bridget in 2008 in the sequel, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. Blake Lively is a force to be reckoned with and she looks like she will be on the circuit for a long time.