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Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Shane West moved to Los Angeles with his mother and sister at the age of nine when his parents divorced. He decided to pursue acting when he
was 15 and in a few years at 17, landed a guest role on the CBS-TV series Picket Fences. Appearances on the ABC sitcom "Boy Meets World" and the WB sitcom "Meego" lead to a role in a
TV movie, "The Westing Game" (1997) alongside Diane Ladd.
West received praise for his performance onstage in Los Angeles as Angel in the Mark Taper Forum's 1998 production of "The
Cider House Rules", directed by Tom Hulce. He also continued to play guest roles on television shows such as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Sliders".
He soon landed the
role of series regular on the surprise hit ABC drama "Once and Again" in 1999. West played Eli, the teenage son of a man who gets involved with a divorced mother following his own divorce. West
won acclaim for the emotional range he exhibited in a role as a burdened young man struggling with a learning disability and carrying on a teen romance while trying to protect his younger sister and
mother from her ex-husband's new relationship.
West made his film debut with a role in Barry Levinson's "Liberty Heights" (1999), a look at a Jewish family in 1954 Baltimore. The
following year he starred as a nerdy high school student who teams up with a dumb jock in a plan to win the girls of their dreams in "Whatever It Takes", a modern teen reworking of "Cyrano
de Bergerac". West was again in the limelight when he played opposite Mandy Moore in the hit teen drama "A Walk to Remember."
West plays guitar and sings with his own band called
Jonny Was. A song by his band (then known as Average Jo) is on the A Walk to Remember soundtrack. Both of Shane's parents were musicians when he was young. His mother was a member of the first all-female
band in Louisiana. His dad's band opened for Blondie.
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