Blake Lively
We saw Blake Lively’s spirit and spunk in her role as Bridget Vreeland in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movie series. Most of us didn’t know Lively when she attended Burbank High School in California, but we watched her play Serena Van Der Woodsen with her competitive, on-screen rival, Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) at the fictional New York Prep school, Constance Billard on the 2007 original television series, Gossip Girl, voted “best show ever” by New York Magazine in 2008.
At Burbank High, Lively was a cheerleader, class president, and a champion choir singer. Would Lively have gained her on-screen success from Gossip Girl, Green Lantern, (where she met her now-husband, Ryan Reynolds) and the dozens of films she starred in since 1988 without cheerleading? It’s debatable. But the drive she gained from being class president and the spirit she developed while cheerleading didn’t hurt.