Hilary Duff

Born September 28, 1987, Hilary Duff was around 13 when Disney Channel cast her as Lizzie McGuire, the endearingly clumsy middle schooler whose animated alter ego voiced her inner thoughts. The show ran from 2001 to 2004 and made her the network's defining face, with The Lizzie McGuire Movie carrying the phenomenon to theaters in 2003.

The same year, Duff proved the Disney-to-pop pipeline could mint real hits. Her album Metamorphosis reached number one on the Billboard 200, sold more than three million copies in the U.S., and earned a triple-platinum certification behind the singles "So Yesterday" and "Come Clean." The follow-ups kept coming fast — the self-titled Hilary Duff debuted at number two in 2004, and Most Wanted debuted at number one in 2005 — on the way to roughly 15 million records sold worldwide by 2014.

Meanwhile she was carrying multiplex movies at the same pace: Agent Cody Banks and Cheaper by the Dozen in 2003, the beloved A Cinderella Story in 2004, then Raise Your Voice and The Perfect Man. The press reached back decades for a comparison, dubbing her "a 2002 version of Annette Funicello" — wholesome, omnipresent, and bankable in two industries at once. The trail she blazed became the standard route for the Disney stars who followed, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez among them.

Duff never disappeared — she led the sitcom Younger from 2015 to 2021 and How I Met Your Father after that — but for anyone who was ten years old in 2003, she is forever Lizzie McGuire with a platinum album — the biggest star in the whole cafeteria.