Maria Elana Bello was born on April 18th, 1967, in Norristown, Pennsylvania to parents Joe and Kathy Bello. She grew up in a working-class suburb with her parents and 3 other siblings, and described her family as passionate and crazy.
Maria graduated from Archbishop Carroll High School and then attended Villanova University where she studied pre-law and political science. It was at Villanova that Maria met the man who was to become a source of inspiration for the rest of her life – Augustinian priest Father Ray Jackson.
Intent on becoming a human rights lawyer, in her junior year at Villanova a friend suggested she take an acting class as an elective – she loved it, and said that she had found her true calling. She was initially worried that she would not be able to make a difference through acting, especially when compared to what she was planning to do, but says that Father Jackson advised her that “You serve best by doing the thing that you love most” and that by doing that, and “doing it well, and being conscious about what you’re giving to the world” it can be just as rewarding for her and others. So the following year she graduated, and got a friend to drive her to New York City on New Years Day, with $300 and her clothes in a trash bag.
One of her first acting teachers in 
New York, Fred Karamen, taught her that good acting does not happen overnight, so, whilst living on a friends floor, Maria kept working hard to develop her talent and taking jobs to pay the rent. She got her first acting roles in small off-Broadway plays such as The Killer Inside Me, Small Town Gals With Big Problems, and Urban Planning, and this then led to the feature film Maintenance and guest appearances on TV series including Misery Loves Company, Nowhere Man, The Commish and Due South.
Whilst working on her blossoming career, Maria dedicated much of her spare time to charitable causes, and in 1992 set up the Dream Yard Drama Project with fellow actor Tim Lord. The Project aimed to help at-risk kids help learn how to express, write and perform their stories.
In the mid 90′s Maria was cast in a remake of the late 1950s detective TV drama, 77 Sunset Strip. The show never aired, but producers Kerry Lenhart and John J. Sakmar saw her episodes and 
were so impressed by her that they decided she would be perfect for their new spy TV series, Mr & Mrs Smith. Joining Scott Bakula as Mr Smith, Maria filmed 13 episodes of the show as Mrs Smith before it was cancelled. She then landed a guest role on NBC’s #1 show, ER, and after her first 3 episode stint she was invited back as a regular for the show’s fourth season. After a year on the show, Maria felt her character wasn’t going anywhere and made the decision to quit. Following on the back of that year she was cast in a small role in Permanent Midnight, and then in larger budget projects Payback and Coyote Ugly, which introduced her to Hollywood.
Following the success of these movies, Maria started to get more offers, and worked on 
Sam the Man, Duets, China: The Panda Adventure, Auto Focus and 100 Mile Rule. But the excitement of her new found fame was eclipsed by the birth of her first child – Jackson Blue McDermott – on March 5th 2001. Named after Father Jackson, Maria’s mentor at college, Jack (as he’s known for short) was Maria’s son with her long-term partner, Dreamworks studio head and writer, Dan McDermott. “I felt more love than I ever could have imagined, and more fear than I ever could have imagined,” she said, adding that Jack had bought a whole new meaning to her life.
Maria’s star continued to rise, and in 2003 she was seen in the role of waitress Natalie Belisario in The Cooler, a drama about a man so unlucky, he is hired to spread that bad luck to lucky gamblers at casinos. 
Maria said she was drawn to the role because the character went on a fully formed journey in the film, she “finds love and falls in love with herself by falling in love with someone else. It’s almost like she comes to understand and accept her own pieces and then she can dream again,” Maria said. This was Maria’s critical breakthrough, and she received numerous awards and nominations for the role, including at the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild. The film also received attention for it’s racy love scenes – while the scene was edited to receive a more modest rating, it showed Maria as a brave actress who was unafraid to go that extra distance for her roles. Maria herself acknowledged that The Cooler was the movie in which she “came into myself as an actor, and that other people noticed me as an actor.”
After the success of The Cooler Maria felt she was able to take a more relaxed approach to getting roles – “I always had to fight for the roles that I got. Now I am pretty much done with it. Really, I just feel like now people know my work and if I love something and if they love my work, that’s great.” Maria was on a roll now, and in 2004 she starred alongside Hollywood mega-star Johnny Depp in Secret Window, in the ensemble film Silver City, as well as the short-film Nobody’s Perfect. 
Unusually for actresses, Maria’s career was really starting to take off as she got older, and she was receiving a lot more offers. 2005 was definitely the year of Maria Bello, with a whole five film releases that year, showcasing her versatility – action-thriller Assualt On Precinct 13, indie film The Sisters, supernatural horror The Dark, dark drama A History Of Violence, and political black-comedy Thank You For Smoking. It was her incredible turn as the wife who discovers her husband is not who she thinks he is in David Cronenburg’s A History Of Violence that really made movie audiences and critics pay attention to her. She received Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations, plus numerous other accolades, but missed out on the Oscar nomination so many thought was hers.
Never one to shy away from controversial projects, Maria was next seen on screen in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, as the wife of a man trapped in the WTC on 9/11. While the film was not a critical or box office success, the project was clearly close to Maria’s heart, and she spoke highly of the real-life woman her character was based on. Her next project was something completely new for her – Flicka was a family film about a girls relationship with a wild horse, in which Maria played a supportive earth mother. Whilst promoting the film Maria admitted that out of all the characters she’d played over the years, this one was the most similar to who she really is. The following year, Maria got her wish to star in a romantic comedy – the literary The Jane Austen Book Club, and Butterfly On A Wheel saw her in a thriller movie with a twist.
Maria had now reached a new peak in her career, but there was still one thing 
missing – since she was little she had always wanted to be in an action movie (“I want to be Indiana Jones,” she once said) but as she was approaching her 40th birthday she didn’t think there would be any chance of that happening. Two days before that birthday she got a call asking if she wanted to replace Rachel Weisz in the 3rd installment of the The Mummy movie trilogy, and, needless to say, a few months later she was on the set! Despite poor reviews, the film grossed over $400m worldwide upon it’s release in the summer of 2008, making it Maria’s biggest hit to date.
More good news followed that summer, as it was announced in Maria’s hometown newspaper, 
The Norristown Times Herald, that she was engaged to boyfriend Bryn Mooser. Maria met Bryn, 28, at a party in 2007 and they “fell in love over a sheer passion of politics, Africa and cryptozoology.” Previously cynical about monogamy, Maria confessed that once she met Bryn she began to understand “the beauty of constancy and history and change and going on the roller coaster with someone—of having a partner in life.” Bryn is often seen accompanying Maria to events, and the occasional paparazzi photo shows the couple out and about together leading a regular life.
Downloading Nancy – perhaps her most controversial project to date – premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008 and had a limited US release in June 2009, and gained Maria some of the best reviews of her career. Small but memorable roles in Towelhead and The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee followed, as well as the soon-to-be-released The Yellow Handkerchief. In December 2008 it was announced Maria was to star in and produce a new crime drama for HBO, but a year later no further details had emerged. She completed two movies in 2009 – the timely financial drama The Company Men, and comedy Grown-Ups.
Now, in 2009, Maria is balancing career with family life, and dramatic projects with lighter fare. 
“I’m not afraid to play my age. I never was. I’ve never been an ingénue. I like getting older,” she once said, and she seems confident and content with the well-respected career she has carved out for herself. She has been dedicating more time to the causes she is most passionate about, including organisations working to promote women’s rights and healthcare, and African relief. Maria spends most of her time in Los Angeles with her son and her fiance, and lives a quiet life, acknowledging that she doesn’t have a “celebrity side of my life” and has learnt how to “stay out of all that Hollywood stuff”. Judging by the way her career has progressed recently, it’s a safe bet to say we’ll be seeing quite a bit more of her over the coming years, although with her knack for choosing the unexpected, it’s hard to say in what!
Biography written by the Maria-Bello.org webmistress – please do not reproduce without permission.