Celebrity crush: Jennifer Lawrence

Here's an up-and-comer who garnered a leading-actress Oscar nomination this year at the ripe age of 20. (Needless to say, her list of credits will be pretty short, though they include this summer's X-Men: First Class -- which, sadly, feels like a train wreck waiting to happen.) Amazon and iTunes links follow. Any affiliate payments earned from your purchase or rental will help pay the hosting fees for my podcasts, so please consider clicking.

Name: Jennifer Lawrence(images | Web site | Twitter)
Hometown: Louisville, Ky., according to her Wikipedia profile.
Best Known For: Jennifer is making her mark as an actress in serious dramatic roles -- most notably the independent films The Burning Plain and Winter's Bone,which won Best Picture at the 2010 Sundance Festival and this year garnered her an Academy Award nomination. Before that, she played a daughter to Bill Engvall and Nancy Travis on the cable sitcom The Bill Engvall Show.

(In an exception from my normal practice, I'm going to include some of her work from before she turned 18. One, an unsold TV pilot, is already offered for sale on this site through a different celebrity crush's profile, and she turned 18 during the second season's air time on the Engvall sitcom. So I'm using the start of the Engvall show as a starting point. This remains more art than science, though to my knowledge, all images here come from her work as an adult.)

Movie-verse Mystique would call this "overdressed."

She'll be playing the shapeshifter Mystique in this summer's prequel X-Men: First Class, a role originated by Rebecca Romijn and one that that requires long hours of body paint and minimal clothing.
Humble Beginnings: She had the acting bug early, Wikipedia notes, getting her parents to take her to New York when she was 14 to look for an agent. She graduated high school two years early to dive into acting, landing the role on Bill Engvall's sitcom as well as roles on Medium (two characters in two different episodes, one of them a younger version of series star Patricia Arquette), Monk,and Cold Case.

She filmed a pilot in 2007 for Not Another High School Show, a sitcom parodying teen shows and featuring fellow celebrity crush Alison Brie(who's since gone on to Mad Men, Community, and a role in Scream 4) among its main cast.
Obligatory Edgy Stuff: She did a bikini photoshoot for Esquire partly to show she has a side beyond just the girl in the deadly serious independent films. Message received.
Why Ye Olde Podcaster Likes Her: She kicked ass in The Burning Plain, and though Ye Olde Podcaster didn't watch Mediumregularly, he did see and enjoy the episode where she played a younger Allison. There's also the urge to root for a young actress from outside the normal Hollywood scene who has reached such prominence so quickly -- here's hoping she remembers her roots and doesn't take a ride on the Lohan express.

Film and TV-movie credits:House at the End of the Street (2012) (Amazon | iTunes) *Truckstop (2011)(rumored) (Amazon | iTunes) * X-Men: First Class(Amazon | iTunes) * Like Crazy (Amazon | iTunes) * The Beaver (Amazon | iTunes) * Winter's Bone(Amazon | iTunes) * Devil You Know (Amazon | iTunes) * The Burning Plain(Amazon | iTunes) * The Poker House (Amazon | iTunes) * Garden Party(Amazon | iTunes)