As with all long-running businesses, the selling of films has become ever-more sophisticated over the years. Audiences are now broken down into clear demographics and movies are conceived and pruned to target them. Perhaps the biggest market to have been recognised and tapped by major studios in recent times is the tweenie girl market, females who are still children but moving quickly towards maturity. Naturally, new stars were required to front the films and, predictably, there were many, many applicants. Many applicants but only two clear winners - Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff. Both would score smash hits onscreen, and both would engage in parallel careers in music. But it was Lohan, perhaps because of an already impressively lengthy CV, who'd come out on top. In 2004, Rob Friedman, Vice President of Paramount would say of her "Right now she's the reigning teen queen. Lindsay is identifiable. She's not an unreal personality. Audiences can relate to her". And how. Freaky Friday was a massive hit, she then headlined another in Mean Girls, then shared top billing with the world's most famous VW Beetle in Herbie: Fully Loaded. And she was smart about it, too. Though her stock had risen to the point where she was paid $7.5 million for playing the lead in the light comedy Just My Luck, she also cleverly sought out adult movie-making experience by taking a bit-part as Meryl Streep's daughter in Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion. The reigning teen queen was clearly preparing herself for the long haul.

She was born Lindsay Morgan Lohan on the 2nd of July, 1986, in Cold Spring Harbour, Long Island, New York. This place was a fair reflection of her Irish-Italian Catholic family's fortunes at this point. A former whaling village, it had been popularised in the early 1900s by well-to-do New Yorkers like Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the founder of Tiffany's, who founded estates there. As time passed the area became famed for its bird sanctuary, the Muttontown Preserve woodlands and then a genetic and cancer research centre that spawned three Nobel Prize winners. Though just a few miles outside the New York conurbation, it was leafy, sparsely populated and rich. Come the year 2000 its population was still 91.3% white with a median income of over $200,000. It was Gatsby country.

So, the Lohans were doing well. Lindsay's father Michael was a Wall Street trader who'd helped build his father's pasta business into a multi-million dollar enterprise (he'd later sell it off to finance a move into film production). Lindsay's mother Dina (nee Sullivan), meanwhile, brought an element of showbiz to the home, being a former TV actress and a member of the exclusive Radio City Rockettes dance troupe. Originally inspired by the Tiller girls in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1922, the Rockettes had become the world's top precision dance group and a major US icon. Having grown in numbers over the years to cope with a 4-shows-a-day 365-days-a-year schedule there were still only 36 Rockettes at any one time. Only the absolute best need apply.

Michael and Dina were both Long Island kids, but from the opposite side of the island. He came from Laurel Hill on the north shore, she from Merrick on the south. They'd marry in 1985. Lindsay was the eldest of four children, brother Michael being born a year later, then sister Aliana in 1994 and a second brother, Dakota, in 1996.

With such a showbiz and money-making background, it should come as no surprise that the Lohans were quick to make use of their first child's precocious nature and red-haired and freckled good looks. Actually the first red-head to be signed by the Ford Modeling Agency, from the age of three she was appearing in TV and print ads, working for Abercrombie and Fitch, Gap, Pizza Hut, Wendy's, Jell-O (with Bill Cosby) and Calvin Klein. Taking dancing and singing lessons from the age of four, she boosted her employment possibilities even further, eventually scoring over 60 commercials. And she loved it. Her mother's glamorous past saw little Lindsay idolising the likes of Ann-Margret (who'd toured with the Rockettes) and Marilyn Monroe while also being impressed by the absurd maturity of the young Jodie Foster. It was no wonder that she felt her mother's influence more strongly that her father's as, in 1990, he was given a 4-year sentence in federal prison for fraudulent trading in commodities futures (he claimed he was just a fall guy). It would not be the last time Lindsay would suffer due to her father's behaviour.

Having at age 7 appeared on The David Letterman Show as a piece of garbage in a sketch called Things You Find On The Floor Of The D-Train, it was inevitable that the ambitious Lindsay would gravitate towards acting and, at the age of 10 she scored a part on Another World, America's second-longest-running soap, concerning the lives and trials of the folk of Bay City. Many household had made a start here, including Morgan Freeman, Ray Liotta and Anne Heche, and Lindsay was taken on as Alexandra Fowler, conceived in sin by show favourites Amanda Corry and Sam Fowler and now having to cope with her mother's tempestuous love life. Lohan would be her character's third incarnation, following on from child actresses Kerri Ann Darling and Hillary Scott.

Before Just My Luck would come Lindsay's first move into adult features. Though she'd brought an amazing maturity to her teen roles, she would now test her ability against some of cinema's finest actors by taking a part in Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion. This would concern Garrison Keillor's famous radio variety show, a hit on 558 public radio stations, which featured a comic Keillor monologue about his fake home in Lake Wobegon, plus comedy sketches and live American roots music. The movie would imagine the show being terminated unexpectedly, leaving singing cowboys Woody Harrelson and John C Reilly and country diva Meryl Streep to deliver one final performance as nutter Virginia Madsen runs riot (Kevin Kline, Tommy Lee Jones and Altman fave Lily Tomlin would also appear). Lohan would try to hold her own as the great Streep's daughter. After this would come Just My Luck, another fuzzy comedy where Lohan would play a Manhattan girl known for her outrageous good fortune who suddenly, through some weird karmic interchange, begins to suffer the bad luck of down-and-out Chris Pine.

These last two movies would point to Lohan's future direction. She would clearly aim to make the most of her Teen Queen status while also building for the future by gaining experience from the lustrous likes of Altman, Streep, Kline and Jones. With her singing career burgeoning, too, the only question would be whether she'd physically have the time to squeeze it all in.