Cameron Diaz whose middle name is Michelle, was born in San Diego, California on August 30, 1972. She is of Cuban, German, English and Cherokee descent. She was a student at Long Beach Polytechnic School, having Snoop Dogg as one of her classmates.

She began her career as a model after being signed with top modeling agency Elite Model Management. She left home at 16 and for the next five years traveled all over the for modeling jobs. At age 21, she auditioned for the movie "The Mask" subsequently getting the part even without having any acting experience to date. This marks the beginning of her rise to stardom.

After this role she started taking acting lessons and accepting roles in low budget, independent films. She breaks through with films such as "There's Something About Mary" and "My Best Friend's Wedding", were both box office hits. Some of her other work includes "Charlie's Angel"(2000,sequel 2003) , "Vanilla Sky", "Gangs of New York" opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, "Shrek"(Part 1,2, Shrek the Third, Shrek Forever After) where she lent her voice to Princess Fiona, just to name a few.

With the sequel of the movie "Charlie's Angels" was the second actress to join the $20 milion per film club, next only to Julia Roberts. She has four Golden Globe nominations under her belt and her latest work is The Boxfrom 2009 Diaz was voted one of the sexiest and most beautiful people in the world a number of times by different publications such as Empire magazine (1995, 2002,2007), People (1998, 2002), FHM(2004, 2006), Stuffmagazine (2002), etc.

In the 1990s Diaz was in a live in relationship with fellow actor Matt Dillon, for a number of years. In 2003 she met Justin Timberlake with whom she maintained a relationship until October 2007, when they officially announced their break up.