I’ve been watching the Alien series of films lately in preparation for our upcoming podcast on the franchise (in anticipation of Prometheus, of course), so I couldn’t resist picking Carrie Henn as today’s Celebrity Birthday of the Day! Carrie only has one acting credit to her name – as Rebecca “Newt” Jordan in James Cameron’s Aliens. To this day, Aliens is Henn’s only film role, with the exceptions being interviews and appearances in documentaries on the Alien series. She had no acting experience prior to Aliens, not even in a school play, and hasn’t acted since. Instead, she earned a degree in liberal studies and child development from California State University, and now works as a schoolteacher. Man, how cool would it be to find out your teacher was the little girl in Aliens? Incidentally, one of my favourite bits of Aliens trivia is that in the scene where Newt falls down the ventilation shaft, Henn apparently kept intentionally blowing the scene so that she would have an excuse to slide down the shaft again and again. When he found out, James Cameron told her that when she did the scene right, she could slide down it as much as she liked. Too cute. Anyway, here’s to Carrie Henn! She got second billing to Sigourney Weaver with no acting experience before or since her single film role. She worked with the top-grossing director of all time, in one of the most popular sci-fi action films ever. Carrie Henn turns 36 today.