Father: Jewish

On her mixed background:

"My mom was black and my dad is Jewish, and I lost my mom when I was seven. That made me feel really different from other kids." Rudolph says she used comedy to cope with this sense of being different. "There’s the power that comedy gives you, and the enjoyment. It’s like ‘Yes, you’re deferring pain, but isn’t it more fun to laugh while you’re doing it?’  

Interesting fact:

She's a long-running cast member on Saturday Night Life; Her mother is the late soul singer Minnie Riperton   (a.k.a. Andrea Davis); Gwyneth Paltrow is her childhood friend.

Father: British

Stowe pretended to be a reporter just so she could meet Jon Travolta before she became famous.

Father: African-American

"If people are going to know me, I just think it's important for them to know I'm half-Black and half-White and that it hasn't been a disadvantage," she told Jet magazine shortly after winning the crown. "I set a goal and I worked hard and I made it."

Chelsi Smith says that "she plans to draw on her biracial background to teach children of all races--especially those of mixed parentage--about the harms of racism and the importance of self-esteem 'because even though I didn't have that many problems with it, I know many do.'"

 Interesting fact:

Smith held both the Miss USA and Miss Universe Title, 1995.

Father: African-American

I tell (people), I'm both (black and white), " she said. "I'm everything. The only thing I'm not is Asian or Hispanic."

Jones struggled financially growing up. Raised by a single mother with five children, Jones had to move constantly and change schools to avoid rent collectors, and at one point ended up living in the bottom of a church. “I just wanted to get out of poverty,” she told the NY Times. “I knew what my mom was experiencing, working two jobs to help feed us. I just knew that getting to college was the answer. I wanted solid ground for the future. My main goal was not track. My main goal was college.”

Jones not only made it to college, but also to the Olympics, representing the United State in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Father: African-American

"Carroll, whose father was African American, suffered painful taunting at the hands of her playmates and from the children at school solely because of her racially mixed background," according to a biographical essay published by the Gale Group Biography Resource Center. "In order to shield herself from ridicule, Carroll attempted to camouflage certain physical characteristics in an attempt to belie her heritage. She habitually straightened her thick, curly hair and created whatever illusion possible in order to present herself as 100 percent Caucasian like her mother."

"We really felt racism in this country. We moved into this council house in Cambridge and we got the national front putting bricks through the window and we got verbal abuse on the street," Carroll  told divastation.com. "One evening, my aunt came over and we were having a barbecue and some of our racist neighbours started shouting at us, in our garden, 'you people are savagtes. why can't you eat indoors, like everybody else.'"

Interesting fact:

Caroll was born in the back of a taxi cab; Carroll was named Best Female Artist at the BRIT Awards in February 1994

Father: English

• Fluent in Persian and English; She was Isabella Rossellini's body double in Death Becomes Her;
•  Her hobbies include cross-stitching and making model cars; She's a scientologist.