Kristy Swanson Movies and Career Information

Kristen Nöel "Kristy" Swanson (born December 19, 1969) is an American actress best known for playing Buffy Summers in the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she also played Catherine "Cathy" Dollanganger in the movie version of the V.C. Andrews book Flowers in the Attic. Swanson started her career at The Actors Workshop with R.J. Adams and promptly moved into TV advertising roles and several one-off appearances in TV series such as Cagney and Lacey and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In 1986, she debuted on the big screen in two John Hughes films: Pretty In Pink, in a non-speaking role, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off as a character who announces a convoluted excuse for Ferris' absence in class. Her first starring role was later in 1986, in Wes Craven's Deadly Friend as Samantha - "the girl next door." The next year she played Cathy in the adaptation of V. C. Andrews' best-seller Flowers in the Attic. By 1990, Swanson had made many television appearances, including multiple appearances in Knots Landing (1987–1988), Nightingales (1989), her first starring role in a TV series, although it only lasted a season, and a short-lived Burt Reynolds television series called B.L. Stryker