Kelli Giddish

Kelli Giddish (born April 13, 1980)[1] is an American television, stage, and film actress. Since 2011, she has played NYPD Detective Amanda Rollins in the NBC crime-drama television series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Giddish previously played Di Henry on the ABC soap opera All My Children (2005–2007), Dr. Kate McGinn in the Fox crime-drama series Past Life (2010), and Annie Nolan Frost in the NBC crime-drama series Chase (2010–2011)

Giddish was born in Cumming, Georgia. She is the daughter of Charles and Nita Giddish, and she has a brother named Eli.[1] Her paternal grandfather nudged her interest in acting along by taking her to the Fox Theatre in Atlanta.[3] Her maternal grandmother was also very supportive of her interests.[3] In Georgia, she attended Forsyth Central High School and was very involved with a local drama teacher named Yatesy Harvey, who was a friend of her mother and ran a community theater. For years in her youth Giddish performed in plays put on by Yatesy Harvey and participated in her sleepover drama camps. Of Harvey, Giddish has been quoted as saying “She just inspired a fierce curiosity and very high standards of what acting was and how much dedication it took and rehearsal and we would do plays every night.”[4] Giddish won a number of accolades in her youth. While at Forsyth Central, she was a member of their championship softball team and in 1998 she was the State Literary Champion for Girls Dramatic Interpretation.[5] Later on she graduated from the University of Evansville in Indiana, where she majored in theater performance.[1] Giddish received much family support of her acting, with her parents driving to Indiana to see her act in every college performance she was in. After college, she moved to NYC to pursue her acting career. Within a year of her arrival, she appeared in a Broadway play with Farrah Fawcett.