On this date in 1985, actress Amanda Michelle Seyfried was born in Allentown, Pa., to Ann (née Sander) and Jack Seyfried. Her mother was an occupational therapist and her father was a pharmacist. She signed a modeling contract in Allentown at age 8, took piano, vocal and acting lessons and became involved in high school theater productions, particularly ones in which she got to sing.
“I went to church when I was a kid every Sunday, and as boring as it was for me, it was still nice to gather and make music. I didn’t necessarily agree with everything, but it was nice to be with my family and my grandparents and friends and something to look forward to.” (New York Times, Dec. 20, 2025)
Her acting career started as a teen as an extra in the soap opera “Guiding Light,” with recurring roles in the soaps “As the World Turns” and “All My Children.” The teen comedy “Mean Girls” (2004) was her debut film appearance. She worked regularly in films and television for several years. (As of this writing in 2025 she had 78 acting credits on IMDb.)
Seyfried (pronounced SIGH-fred) appeared on 11 episodes in 2004-06 of “Veronica Mars” with Kristen Bell in the title role. After other movie and TV roles, she appeared in 44 episodes of HBO’s “Big Love” (2006-11) as a daughter in a polygamous Mormon family in Utah. In the rom-com film “Mamma Mia!” (2008) with an ensemble cast including Meryl Streep, Seyfried’s vocal talents were showcased and the soundtrack was Grammy-nominated.
Those talents were also displayed in “Les Misérables” (2012) and the sequel “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” in 2018. She married actor Thomas Sadoski after they eloped in March 2017. Their daughter Nina was born that year and a son Thomas followed in 2020.
She struggled with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder and started taking the medication Lexapro long-term when she was 19. In her 30s, she decided to “explore my spirituality in a different way with Pema Chodron, the Buddhist teacher, and meditate, climb mountains and just sit with myself, which I had never done. That really opened up something for me, like a complete spiritual awakening, for sure.” (Ibid., New York Times)
Seyfried gave a musical tour-de-force performance in “The Testament of Ann Lee” (2025), not a traditional musical but one in which music and dancing are integral to the film. It is based on the 18th-century life of Lee, who founded a Quaker spinoff in England called the Quaking Shakers because of the music and ecstatic dancing that characterized their worship. Many followers saw “Mother Lee” as the female equivalent to Christ.
After serving several jail terms for breaking the Sabbath and blasphemy, Lee brought the sect to New York state in 1774 and had four children who all died in infancy. The Shakers slowly expanded in New England and grew to about 6,000 members. (Due to its doctrine of celibacy, by 2025, only three known members were left.)
Lee came to believe that sexual lust had caused the fall of humankind and only through celibacy could God’s earthly kingdom be furthered. The song “Come Life, Shaker Life” includes the lyric “Shake, shake out of me, all that is carnal.” The song was rewritten slightly by Richie Havens without attribution in 1968.
“Life is hard, which is why we search for a higher power — whether it be God or Mother Nature, Jesus — it doesn’t really matter who your higher power is … whether it’s a woman or a man or an elephant or a fucking cat. It’s that these entities make you feel safe,” Seyfried told Religion News Service. (Dec. 22, 2025)
“What [Lee] preached was community and compassion and kindness,” Seyfried said. “She created a — not a cult, not like a religious movement — but more like a utopia” based on total equality of the sexes and races. (Yahoo.com, Dec. 24, 2025)
PHOTO: Seyfried’s voice roles included one as Ellie in “Family Guy” in 2018; photo under CC 3.0.
