Alicia Silverstone is celebrating her 50th birthday. The Clueless star was born on Oct. 4, 1976, in San Francisco, California, and 50 years later she remains one of the most recognizable faces of ‘90s pop culture.
Silverstone’s career started early. During an appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert, she revealed she got into modeling by age eight, and was hired for her first acting job—a Domino’s Pizza commercial—at age 14.
“The modeling thing was not for me. I didn’t like it,” Silverstone said. “My dad, he took me to the theater all the time. So, I loved the theater. …I moved to L.A. when I was 14 because I’d gone to do this thing, this acting camp for the summer …and we did a showcase, and things started happening, and I didn’t understand what was happening, but things were happening.”
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What was happening was that Silverstone was getting noticed. As a teen, she appeared in a 1992 episode of The Wonder Years before making her film debut in the 1993 movie The Crush at age 16.
Soon after, Silverstone became a music video queen, starring in three Aerosmith music videos for the songs “Cryin’,” “Amazing,” and “Crazy.” Silverstone once revealed that video director Marty Callner saw her in The Crush and cast her in the “Cryin’” music video.
“He liked what he saw in the movie,” Silverstone told Rolling Stone in 1995. “And what he saw was a good actress, not a pretty girl. It’s about what you have inside.”
“Aerosmith made a hell of a lot of money off that video,” she added of the first of her three Aerosmith videos. “Their sales tripled or something. They would have been crazy not to ask me back.”
By the mid-‘90s, Silverstone was a superstar, starring in the 1995 comedy film Clueless as Cher Horowitz, a rich girl with a heart of gold. The film was a box office smash.
“Clueless was the first comedy I ever did,” Silverstone told Vogue. “I was the lead in this, and I had sixty-four costume changes, so I didn’t have a life. … I didn’t expect any of the reaction that we got. It was a lot… at the time I didn’t know anything about what I was stepping into.”
From there, she starred in The Babysitter, played Batgirl in Batman & Robin, and went on to carve out a prolific acting career spanning over 30 years. Silverstone is also an animal rights activist, an author, and the mother of a son, Bear Blu, 15, from her marriage to Christopher Jarecki.
Silverstone has also seemingly found the fountain of youth. The actress has been vocal about aging naturally, telling Byrdie magazine in 2025 that she doesn’t do Botox or fillers and instead credits her decades-long plant-based diet for her youthful looks.
“All of a sudden, my nails got really thick and strong. My hair got really thick. My eyes got all white,” Silverstone said of the results of her changed diet. “I feel like it really works with aging well.”
“I have lines,” she added. “As I age, I’m aware that I don’t look like everybody else. But I don’t lose sleep over it. I don’t prioritize it that much… And I don’t think anything that you put on is going to do what the inside does — that radiance, that glow, that joy.”
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