EXCLUSIVE Hollywood star who played Kevin Costner's daughter flashes armpit hair during LA outing... can you guess who?
And on Monday, the 42-year-old star was pictured stepping out in Los Angeles, distinctly showing her armpit hair.
The mom-of-two — who, like fellow actor Tom Cruise, belongs to the Church of Scientology — ran errands in a casual look, sporting a sleeveless black top and ripped blue jeans.
The Seattle native — who is married to a cyclist — completed the look with white sneakers and a white crossbody bag.
She also sported a necklace and gold earrings, and wore her hair styled in a half-updo.
Can you guess who she is?
That's right! It's Erika Christensen.
She's built a career with roles in films like Traffic (2000), Swimfan (2002), The Banger Sisters (2002), The Perfect Score (2004), Flightplan (2005) and more.
In Steven Soderbergh's 2000 crime drama Traffic she famously portrayed cocaine user Caroline Wakefield.
She won the MTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Female Performance for the role.
In 2005, Christensen co-starred in The Upside of Anger as Andy Wolfmeyer, alongside Costner and Joan Allen.
She then took on a starring role in the short-lived ABC drama series, Six Degrees, in 2006.
From 2010 to 2015, Christensen starred as Julia Braverman-Graham in NBC's family drama series Parenthood.
Since 2023, she's been starring as Angie Polaski in ABC's Will Trent.
She had guest star roles in television series including Frasier, The Practice, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and Touched by an Angel.
The star also made a guest appearance on the Fox sitcom That '70s Show, which reunited her with her Traffic co-star Topher Grace.
Christensen's family moved from Seattle to suburban Los Angeles when she was four.
Her parents, who became Scientologists in their twenties, raised her within the Church of Scientology.
The Seattle native ran errands in a casual look, sporting a sleeveless black top and ripped blue jeans
She also sported a necklace and gold earrings, and wore her hair styled in a half-updo
Erika opened up about her association with Scientology on an episode of the Armchair Expert podcast in 2018.
'I can justify things in all kinds of different ways, but basically, like, as a Scientologist. And I definitely cannot speak for every Scientologist about anything because everybody has their own beliefs and comes at it from even other religions and all kinds of stuff,' she shared.
'However, I don't believe this is the first time I have lived on this planet and I basically think I've probably done absolutely everything before,' she added.
When asked about the criticism the church has faced throughout the years, she said: 'I don't think that it comes from an actual place of, like, your critiques. I don't think it comes from critical thinking.'
Christensen got engaged to cyclist Cole Maness in November 2014.
They married on September 5, 2015, in Palm Springs, California. The couple lives in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, and has two daughters, Shane and Polly.
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At times Williams's book reads like a catalogue of those works, from The Black Book (a compendium of black life in America) to work by June Jordan, Lucille Clifton and Toni Cade Bambara, as well as autobiographies of Angela Davis, Huey Newton and Muhammad Ali, and Gayl Jones's Corregidora (which was reissued in 2019). Nevertheless, it is a fascinating catalogue, not least because it is full of thrilling behind-the-scenes insights into what it took to get them published. Morrison was keenly aware that success depended on proving that books such as these could sell; demand would have to be so high that, as Williams writes, 'even the most recalcitrant salesperson would have no choice but to fall in line'. The first job was making sure the books were excellent. Williams provides a number of examples of Morrison's exacting standards, including the fact that, while working on a collection of Huey Newton's essays, she recommended deleting the weak ones and editing the rest, 'even those that had been previously published'. But Morrison was also required to navigate 'the irony of the need to be appealing to white people while also preserving enough distance from them to maintain Black privacy', keeping one eye on the bottom line even while the other was on black consciousness. On one memorable occasion, when the poet Barbara Chase-Riboud stonewalled her about doing publicity (loftily describing it as 'tap [dancing] for prizes and coverage'), Morrison fired off a flinty letter reminding her that Random House was 'a commercial house historically unenchanted with 500 slim volumes of profound poetry that languish in stock rooms'. Morrison could be blunt when she had to be but, alongside this, Williams paints a picture of her as a fiercely protective editor, chasing blurbs and championing her projects with passion, tenacity and a moving sense of urgency, 'scared that the world would fall away before somebody put together a thing that got close to the way we really are'. In addition, Williams highlights her convivial and collaborative approach, which led to the development of close friendships with a few of her authors including, famously, Angela Davis, who lived with Morrison and her sons for a time while they worked on her autobiography. It is astonishing to consider that at the same time as doing all this Morrison was also busy raising two sons and writing her own novels, frequently leveraging her literary status in service of her editorial campaigns. Williams includes references to a 1978 interview in which Morrison hinted at how exhausting this was: 'I want to stop writing around the edges of the day … in the automobile and places like that.' Which makes it even more astonishing to consider how little has changed since she fought this fight. According to Dan Sinykin, writing in Literary Hub in October 2023: 'In 1971, when Morrison became a trade editor, about 95% of the fiction published by the big commercial houses was by white authors. By 2018, that number only dropped to 89%.' In August 2024, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris pointed out in the New York Times that following the hiring of 'a small but influential group' of black female editors in 2020, many had 'lost their jobs or quit the business entirely … [leading] some … to question publishers' commitment to racial inclusion'. In the UK the position is hardly any better. The fight is still necessary, and still exhausting. However, Williams's book is a timely reminder of the need for an inward-looking response, and of the joy to be discovered along the way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is best when it is penetrated by Morrison's own voice, in the form of excerpts from her correspondence. Here, for example, is Toni attempting to persuade Bill Cosby (with his reputation as yet untarnished) to write an introduction for The Black Book: 'Let me just say … I want to publish books about us – black people – that will make some sense – to give joy, to pass on some grandeur to all those black children (born and unborn) who need to get to the horizon with something under their arms besides Dick and Jane and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.' At the time she wrote those lines, I was one of those black children, and I am grateful that the books she published did exactly that. The same spirit of gratitude permeates Williams's scholarly, informative and highly readable book. Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship by Dana A Williams is published by Amistad (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
