Michelle Lynn Monaghan was born on March 23, 1976, in Winthrop, Iowa, USA. She is the youngest of three children and the only daughter of Sharon and Bob-John Monaghan. After graduating from high school in Iowa, she studied journalism for three years at Chicago's Columbia College. In order to pay for college, she took a job as a model for catalogues. In 1999, she quit college and moved to New York to work full-time as a fashion model. At that time she traveled around the world with stints on the runways in Milan, Singapore, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, and also enjoyed a number of poses in magazines and catalogues.In 2000, she made her TV debut in two episodes of "Young Americans" (2000), then appeared in 'Law and Order: Special Victims Unit'. She made her big screen debut with a small role of Henrietta in Perfume (2001). Monaghan shot to fame in 2002, when she co-starred as Kimberly Woods on the TV series "Boston Public" (2000) for one season. After appearances in several supporting roles, she starred opposite Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer in the black comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005). During the second half of 2005, Monaghan was filming in China, Italy, and the United States in Mission: Impossible III (2006), as the female lead opposite Tom Cruise.In August of 2005, in Sydney, Australia, Michelle Monaghan married her longtime sweetheart, Pete White, a New York based graphic designer, whom she met at a Manhattan party five years earlier.