Mischa Anne Barton was born on January 24, 1986, in London, England. Her family moved to New York when she was only four years old. At the age of 8, Mischa and one of her two sisters were sent to summer camp. One of the activities involved the children writing their own monologues and performing them for their parents. Mischa wrote a piece about turtles and her delivery was so impressive that an agent who was scouting for talent told her parents they had a star on their hands.
Her parents were thrilled of course, but at the same time wondered if it was an appropriate path for their daughter. When she was 9 and in the fifth grade, Mischa decided that it was something she definitely wanted to try. The aspiring actress and child model got her first professional break on the New York stage in 1994, when she played one of the lead characters in an off-Broadway production of Tony Kushner's Slavs. Earning rave reviews for her performance, Mischa went on to perform in a number of plays, including the Lincoln Center production of James Lapine's Twelve Dreams and the lead in Naomi Wallace's One Flea Spare at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theatre. While she was building a career on the stage and as a model for the likes of Calvin Klein, Mischa was also beginning to accumulate a number of screen credits. After doing a year-long stint on the popular soap opera All My Children, she had her first publicized screen role in the little-seen New York Crossing. The film was released in 1997, the same year that Lawn Dogs came out to fairly strong reviews that resulted in the first shades of publicity for Mischa. A starring role as a 13-year-old who holds up a bank alongside her boyfriend followe in the 1999 independent drama Pups. That same year, Barton appeared in supporting roles in both Notting Hill and The Sixth Sense. 2000 saw Mischa in the films Skipped Parts, Paranoid and the title character in Frankie and Hazel. The following year was another big one with a roles in Tart, and the Sundance films Lost and Delirious and Julie Johnson. A recurring role in TV's Once and Again followed and in 2003 Mischa took on the role of Marissa Cooper in one of TV's hottest new shows The O.C.