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Biography

Holly Marie Combs was born December 3, 1973, in San Diego, California. At the time of her birth, her 15-year-old mother and 17-year-old father quit school to marry, only to divorce two years later. At the age of 8, Holly Marie moved to New York City with her mother, Lauralei, who had hopes of being an actress and a singer. Soon Holly Marie was appearing in print and television ads, so when her new stepfather moved into their cramped studio apartment when she was 12, he had two aspiring actresses on his hands. Holly Marie became increasingly committed to her pursuits, and gained her Screen Actors Guild card for her minor role in 1985's Walls of Glass, which also featured her mother. Small roles gradually came along, most notably 1988's Sweet Hearts Dance, in which she played the on-screen daughter of Don Johnson and Susan Sarandon, and a part in Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July, starring Tom Cruise. Combs established herself as an up-and-coming TV actress, though, in the role of Tom Skerritt and Kathy Baker's daughter on producer/writer David E. Kelley's Emmy award-winning family drama Picket Fences (1992-1996). After the series ended, Combs stayed with the medium, starring as Texas teen-killer Diane Zamora in the TV docudrama Love's Deadly Triangle: The Texas Cadet Murder (1997), and as the daughter of a murdered heiress in USA Network's Our Mother's Murder (1997). Combs returned to series TV as grounded middle sibling Piper on producer Aaron Spelling's Charmed in 1998. Co-starring TV vixens Shannen Doherty and Alyssa Milano, the tale of three beautiful, supernaturally endowed sisters appealed to the WB network's young female audience, and Charmed became a hit