Fisher was born in Muscat, Oman to Scottish parents from Bathgate and Stranraer. They resided in Muscat because of her father’s job as a banker for the United Nations. Her name, after the Scottish island of Islay, is pronounced eye-la; she has four brothers. Fisher spent her infancy in Bathgate before moving with her family to Perth, Western Australia, when she was nine months old. Fisher has said that she had a “great” upbringing in Perth with a “very outdoorsy life”. She began appearing in commercials on Australian television at the age of nine, before going on to win roles in popular children’s television shows Bay City and Paradise Beach. She attended Methodist Ladies’ College and appeared in lead roles in school productions.

At the age of 18, with the help of her mother, she wrote two teen novels, Bewitched and Seduced by Fame, that became bestsellers. From 1994 to 1997 she played the role of Shannon Reed on the hit Australian soap opera Home and Away. After leaving the popular soap, Fisher enrolled at a prestigious theatre and arts training school in Paris, and went on to appear in Pantomime in the United Kingdom. She also toured with Darren Day in the Summer Holiday musical, and appeared in a London theatre production called Così. In 2002 she had a part in the film version of Scooby-Doo as Mary-Jane, Shaggy’s love interest, and subsequently was taken on by an American agent. A larger role in Wedding Crashers, alongside Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, in 2005 won her the Breakthrough Performance Award at the MTV Movie Awards. While promoting Wedding Crashers, she was officially crowned the 1000th guest on Australian talk show Rove on 2 August 2005. She entered the set ahead of Owen Wilson, winning the title by two meters.

In 2006, Fisher starred as Becca, a Manhattan party host, in the relationship drama London co-starring Jessica Biel, Chris Evans and Jason Statham. In 2007, she appeared in The Lookout, a thriller co-starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Matthew Goode, and Hot Rod, opposite Andy Samberg. She was scheduled to appear in The Simpsons Movie, although her appearance was cut from the final version. In 2008, she starred in Wedding Daze with Jason Biggs, Definitely, Maybe, with Ryan Reynolds, Elizabeth Banks, and Abigail Breslin, and had a voice role in Horton Hears a Who! Fisher has also co-written a script entitled Groupies with Amy Poehler, as well as another project entitled The Cookie Queen. She starred in the movie adaption of the book Confessions of a Shopaholic, which opened on February 13, 2009. In the film, Fisher played a college graduate who works as a financial journalist in New York City to support her shopping addiction.

Fisher has spoken out against the lack of opportunities for comediennes in Hollywood.

Fisher lives with her fiancé, English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in London. She met Cohen at a party in Sydney, Australia. Fisher converted to Judaism after three years of study, completing her conversion in early 2007 and taking on the Hebrew name Ayala (איילה), the Hebrew word for Doe; she has described herself as “quite observant”. As of February 2009, the couple have not set a date for their wedding. On October 19, 2007, Fisher gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Olive, in Los Angeles.

Fisher has said that her “sensibility is Australian” and that she has a “laid-back attitude to life” that she feels “very Australian.” Her mother and siblings live and work in Athens, Greece, while her father lives in Frankfurt, Germany.

Links

• Isla Fisher – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Isla Fisher – Cool chicks

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“That’s typical,” beams Morgan as he recalls the incident. “Zack’s eyes are huge with panic, and it’s because he’s worried about the suit. I wasn’t badly hurt. But if this role was a little hard at times, it was not because of things like that. It’s because of the character I play, the Comedian. Indeed, all the characters in Watchmen are not what people might expect from a comic-book film.”

That would be an understatement. Watchmen is the Crime and Punishment of graphic novels, a dark, difficult story set in a dystopian universe. Created by the cult British writer-artist pairing of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, it first appeared as 12 monthly comics in 1986 and 1987, before being collected into a seminal graphic novel that has sold 750,000 copies, won a Hugo science-fiction award and been voted into Time magazine’s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.

Moore’s tale is a sprawling cold-war murder-mystery, a neo-noir infused with a vast conspiracy and the threat of nuclear armageddon. It unfolds during an alternative 1980s where the Watergate scandal didn’t occur and Nixon still occupies the White House. In this America, the costumed crime-fighter is a fixture of everyday existence, although, importantly, these spandex-clad scrappers do not have superpowers.

The series was originally pitched as a vehicle for DC Comics to roll out two recently acquired properties, Captain Atom and Blue Beetle, but when the comic-book giant ditched this plan, Moore created his own characters. “They are deep and complex — it’s subversive,” Morgan continues. “Unless people know the book, they won’t expect characters like the Comedian. He does terrible things. I certainly know that, for me, for Zack and for countless fans, Watchmen made comic books feel entirely credible. You were no longer childish or geeky just because you were reading one.”

In truth, the average child — although not necessarily the average geek — would struggle with Watchmen’s central themes. This is not a predictable comic-book world where everything bar the illustrations is cast in black and white, with good versus evil and the white knights triumphant. It’s a sombre, brooding story, and the masks worn by the costumed vigilantes conceal more than just their everyday identities: the Comedian is a violent misogynist, while his inkblot-masked colleague Rorschach, brought to life by Jackie Earle Haley, is a vengeful sociopath. Rare for a comic-book adaptation, Watchmen also comes with an 18 rating.

“It is hard to make excuses for a man who can impregnate a woman then shoot her, or do what my character does to the woman he loves,” Morgan notes. “There was one scene in particular — it was beyond an attempted rape, it was absolutely vicious — that was much harder than anything else I have ever filmed in my life. It made me think, ‘Jesus, is this what I want to be doing as an actor?’ ” Earle Haley agrees: “When you look at things through these characters’ bent perspectives, you start to realise how bent the world we live in really is, what we do to each other in the name of our own interests. I know Jeffrey had trouble with some of his character’s scenes, and I did too. There’s one where I exact vengeance on this pervert. It freaked me out. When you leave the set at the end of the day, these are hard guys to shake off.”

The other characters who flesh out the story include Silk Spectre II (played by Malin Ackerman), Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Ozymandias (Brideshead Revisited’s Matthew Goode) — plus the one being in the Watchmen world who does possess superpowers, Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup, who almost went up in flames himself when the sensors on his motion-capture suit started to smoulder). Manhattan is a nuclear physicist who, in true comic-book fashion, acquires his powers after an experiment goes awry. Their tale picks up in New York City in 1985, where the government has passed an act outlawing costumed vigilantes. When the Comedian is murdered, potentially world-ending events unfold.

“I guess Watchmen looks at the reasons people might want to wear a spandex outfit and go fight crime,” Snyder says. “Then there are the moral issues of people dispensing justice to others just because they believe them to be bad people.

It also deals with much broader, bigger themes. For me, the central one is summed up in the credits when we show an image of Hiroshima. As nuclear war looms large in the 1980s, this is the moral imperative in the movie — killing 200,000 people to save millions.”

Snyder believes The Dark Knight wouldn’t have come about were it not for Moore’s Watchmen and its recalibration of the comic book’s usual you’re-either-good-or-bad values. “Although, saying that, I think our movie allows itself lighter moments than that film does . . . After all, our main characters all get to wear lurid costumes!” Yet Watchmen almost didn’t come about at all. Snyder was first approached to direct while he was putting the finishing touches to 300, another stylish comic-book adaptation, about the last stand of Leonidas’s Spartans against the Persian hordes. “The project had been to every studio in town — it had been to Warner Brothers twice,” he explains. Indeed, by the time Snyder looked at the studio’s draft of the script, the film had spent 15 years in development. The producers once entered talks with Joel Silver, the man who backed the Matrix franchise, who tried to sign up the Governator. “Even then,” Snyder says, “every studio was saying, ‘Giant graphic novel? No chance. You can’t get Arnold Schwarzenegger? No chance.’ ”

That said, the film almost took flight during this 15-year maelstrom, with Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass all hopping into — then jumping straight out of — the cockpit. When Greengrass, fresh from his success with Jason Bourne, showed interest, Paramount almost got the project up and running, with Joaquin Phoenix, Jude Law and Hilary Swank lined up. Then the studio got cold feet, worrying about spending $100m or more on a comic-book movie with no famous characters, no place in generic popular culture and no obvious potential for a money-spinning sequel.

Watchmen: the most darkly ambitious of graphic novels

In a gritty and alternate 1985 the glory days of costumed vigilantes have been brought to a close by a government crackdown, but after one of the masked veterans is brutally murdered an investigation into the killer is initiated. The reunited heroes set out to prevent their own destruction, but in doing so discover a deeper and far more diabolical plot. Written by evan murphy

“Watchmen” is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the “Doomsday Clock” – which charts the USA’s tension with the Soviet Union – is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the washed up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion – a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers – Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity… but who is watching the Watchmen?” Written by T-Hen

It’s the 1980′s and it’s a different world. Superheroes have been outlawed, the only ones still in operation under direct control of the United States government. Suddenly, those heroes both still in action and retired find themselves targets by an unseen enemy, who wants to kill them one by one Written by Anonymous

A group of heroes, forced into retirement a decade before are called together once again to investigate the murder of one of their own. What they discover an age-old conspiracy to change the balance of power in a world not different from our own. Written by Kent Sanderson

An adaptation of Alan Moore’s landmark comic book series, Watchmen is a story set in an alternative 1985, where the world is ticking closer to the brink of nuclear war, and a plot to eliminate a band of ex-crimefighters is instigated, but why? and by whom? It is up to two of those ex-crimefighters to investigate the plot that seems to go beyond the unthinkable.

Other Information

• Production Status:  In Production/Awaiting Release
• Logline:  After a law is passed to thwart the efforts of group of crimefighters, one of them is mysteriously murdered.
• Genres:  Action/Adventure, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Thriller, Crime/Gangster and Adaptation
• Release Date:  March 6th, 2009 (wide)
• MPAA Rating:  R for strong graphic violence, sexuality, nudity and language.
• Distributors:  Warner Bros. Pictures
• Production Co.:  Lawrence Gordon Productions
• Studios:  Warner Bros. Pictures
• Filming Locations:  Vancouver, Canada
• Produced in:  United States

Cast and Credits

• Starring: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson
• Directed by:  Zack Snyder
• Produced by: Lawrence Gordon, Lloyd Levin, Deborah Snyder

Links

• Official site
• Watchmen at the Internet Movie Database