Born March 24, 1970, in Davenport, Iowa, Big was named after actress Julie Christie's character in Doctor Zhivago, foreshadowing the path her life would take. Lara was an only child, and her parents divorced when she was six years old. Following the breakup, Lara moved to Chicago with her mother, where they settled down near Wrigley Field. She would never see nor speak to her father again.

At a young age, Lara was diagnosed with a learning disability, and was consequently enrolled in an improvisational workshop to develop ways of expressing herself. Over the course of the workshop, Lara developed a strong interest in acting, as well as a knack for it. She was offered, and accepted, a scholarship to the Chicago Academy for the Arts.

While she was still in her sophomore year, Lara received her first casting call, for the TV miniseries Amerika. She made her film debut the following year, in 1988's Poltergeist III, and went on to win a role in the 1989 made-for-TV movie, The Preppie Murder.

Having already gained a wealth of television experience while still in her high-school years, Lara felt that her course was set. On the day after her graduation from the Chicago Academy, Lara and her mother moved to Los Angeles, hoping to build on the promising beginning of her career in the geographical heart of the entertainment industry.

In 1990, Lara landed the part of vixen-next-door Donna Hayward in David Lynch's cult series, Twin Peaks. This role has often been cited as her big break, and, while there is no doubt that it spring-boarded her career to another level, at the time it also served to typecast her to a certain degree.

Despite the fact that hers was perhaps the most normal of the Twin Peaks characters, a great number of the roles that followed shared in the same dark, quirky tone that had marked Lynch's series, such as that of the psychotic temp in 1993's The Temp.

Another characteristic common to several of Lara's early roles was their placement within films that can at best be described as box-office disasters. The Dark Backward (1991), The Road to Wellville (1994) and Baby's Day Out (1994) all bombed horribly, and Farmer and Chase was the lowest grossing movie of 1997, raking in a whopping $1,323.

While such a rapid succession of failures might normally put an end to a career, Lara's talent saved her from such a fate. Her natural acting abilities secured her several strong supporting roles, and the abundance of bad projects she was involved in was balanced out by appearances in movies such as The Rookie (1990) and Wayne's World (1992). Her performance in Todd Solondz's 1998 film Happiness was received with critical acclaim, and garnered her the National Board of Review's Ensemble Performance Award.

Lara returned to the small screen in the late '90s, and after losing out the title role in Ally McBeal to Calista Flockhart, landed the part of sultry cutthroat A.D.A. Helen Gamble in David E. Kelley's legal series, The Practice. The show proved to be an instant hit, and garnered the 1999 Emmy for Best Drama.

The success of The Practice positioned Lara as a fixture in the public eye, as have a series of well-publicized relationships with Hollywood's leading men. Alleged flings with David Spade, Harrison Ford Jack Nicholson and, as of late, Bruce Willis have turned Lara into a magnet for gossip columnists, and her waiflike appearance has made her the object of much Hollywood hounding.

The Practice is under contract with ABC through the 2003-2004 season, so don't expect Lara to vanish anytime soon. She's also going to return to film in a big way this summer, playing the baddie in Men in Black 2. The same year that Farmer and Chase earned the distinction of lowest grossing movie, Men in Black took the #1 spot, amassing $249.5 million. This time around, Lara's on the right side of the coin and superstardom may be just around the corner.