Lisa Edelstein born May 21, 1966 is an American actress and playwright. She currently stars as Dr. Lisa Cuddy on the television drama House.
Edelstein was born to a Jewish family in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Alvin and Bonnie Edelstein. Her father is a pediatrician in New Jersey at Chilton Memorial Hospital. The youngest of three children, she was raised in Wayne, New Jersey.

Edelstein attended Wayne Valley High School, graduating in 1984. She moved to New York City at the age of 18 to study theatre at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. While living in New York, she became involved in the club scene (known there only as "Lisa E.") and caused enough of a stir in the community to be dubbed New York City's "Queen of Downtown" by writer and fellow celebutante James St. James, who briefly refers to Edelstein in his 1999 book Disco Bloodbath.


Lisa Edelstein is a veteran of series television who plays Dr. Lisa Cuddy in the medical drama House (starring Hugh Laurie). Born in Boston, she grew up in New Jersey and moved to New York City in the mid-1980s to pursue a career in theater. She found regional fame as a party girl in New York's club scene, which she then parlayed into a career as an actress, first by producing her own stage production about AIDS, Positive Me (1989), then by landing a job as the host of MTV's short-lived daytime show, Awake on the Wild Side (1990, as Lisa E.). Since then she's made a handful of feature films and made her mark as a guest star on some of television's hottest shows. She has played love interests in Seinfeld (opposite Jason Alexander), The West Wing (opposite Rob Lowe) and Boston Legal (opposite James Spader), and had memorable roles in Ally McBeal (1997-2002, starring Calista Flockhart) and Felicity (1998-2002, starring Keri Russell)