Kristin Bauer van Straten

Kristin Bauer van Straten is one of the semi-recurring actors of Once Upon a Time, portraying the role of Maleficent.

Life
Bauer was born Kristin A. Neubauer on November 26, 1966, in Racine, Wisconsin, USA. In her childhood she played sports, rode horses, and shot guns. She graduated from The Prairie School in Racine. Van Straten studied fine arts at Washington University in St. Louis as well as in Boston and New York (Parsons The New School for Design) in her youth, but decided to become an actress and moved to Los Angeles, where she has been living since she began acting in 1994. She continues to draw and paint. Her works include commissioned portraits. Van Straten carries out conservation work to improve the treatment of animals. She lives with many rescued animals at her home in Los Angeles. On August 1, 2009, van Straten married South African musician Abri van Straten, of the group The Lemmings, at her family’s farm in Wisconsin.

Career
In 1995, she had her first recurring role in a television series, as Maggie Reynolds on The Crew. Other recurring roles are those of Geneva Renault in Total Security, Candy Cooper in That's Life, Rebecca Colfax in Dirty Sexy Money, and Belinda Slypich in Hidden Hills.

Perhaps her best-known film role was in Dancing at the Blue Iguana in 2000. Bauer played a porn star appearing as the featured act at a Los Angeles strip club and performed an extended nude dance. In 2001, she starred in the award-winning short film Room 302 and in 2004 she had a minor role in 50 First Dates, starring Adam Sandler. In the animated series Justice League she supplied the voice of the superhero Mera.

She has also made a number of guest appearances in several television shows, including LA Law, Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, Dark Angel, Two and a Half Men, Star Trek: Enterprise, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Desperate Housewives, and George Lopez.

Van Straten currently plays the role of vampire Pam on the HBO series True Blood. In 2011, she was cast in the ABC fantasy-drama series Once Upon a Time as the wicked Maleficent, a friend/rival of the Evil Queen.

Activism
n 2011 van Straten teamed with the Animal Legal Defense Fund in the fight to free Tony, a 10-year-old Siberian-Bengal tiger who had spent every day and night of the last decade at the Tiger Truck Stop in Grosse Tete, Louisiana. She's also worked with Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine to promote cosmetics that are not tested on animals.