Actress Nina Dobrev

Thirty years old as of this writing, Nina Dobrev has had a television career more interesting than many actresses twice her age.

The Canadian actress first caught people's attention as Mia Jones, a teenage mother in the second iteration of the Degrassi High School series, "DeGrassi: The Next Generation," which ran from 2006 to 2009.  From there, almost immediately, she gained fame as Elena Gilbert in "The Vampire Diairies," a series based on the eponymously titled young-adult book series about an orphaned girl named Elena Gilbert - played by Ms. Dobrev - who falls in love with a young-looking vampire.  Vampires were the "in" thing in television back then, so Ms. Dobrev's timing was perfect.   

Over the course of eight years, she found herself playing two other roles on "The Vampire Diaries" - seems Elena had two doppelgangers - one named Katherine Pierce, a long-dead vampire, and another by the name of Amara, the world's first immortal woman.  And she played yet another doppelganger in the "Vampire Diaries" spinoff "The Originals."  Needless to say, it would take too long to explain the plot twists here.  But for eight seasons, fans kept watching.

Although she's been in a few movies, such as the 2012 coming-of-age film The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Ms.Dobrev's forte remains television. She also starred in "Fam," a 2019 CBS sitcom in which she played a single woman who has to deal with her younger sister moving in, but it didn't make it past its thirteen-episode tryout.  Most likely, though, we haven't seen the last of Nina Dobrev yet.

Fun facts:  Nina Dobrev was born in Bulgaria before her family emigrated to Canada, and she was christened Nina Dobreva, as Slavic women are usually given a feminizing "a" to follow their surnames.  She's also trilingual, speaking Bulgarian as well as the two official Canadian languages, English and French.