An actress since her childhood, Holly Marie Combs has established herself as one of the most talented and successful television actresses of her generation. She broke the wall separating the small-time wannabes and the real deals with the role of the teen-aged Kimberly Brock on the Emmy-winning CBS prime time series Picket Fences and continued her flight starring as Piper Halliwell in a successful drama series Charmed.

Holly Marie Combs was born December 3, 1973 in San Diego, California. Holly's mother, Lauralei Combs, was only fourteen when she got pregnant and fifteen when Holly was born. Although Holly's 15-year-old mother and 17-year-old father both quit school to marry, they divorced after only two years, feeling they were too young to make a marriage work.
Despite this unpropitious beginning, Lauralei took good care of Holly. Until Holly was eight, the mother and daughter lived in San Diego, then Lauralei and Holly moved to New York City where Holly studied acting at the Professional Children's School where her teachers included Ernie Morton. "I was a very solitary kid and I didn't have a lot of friends when I was younger," says Combs. "Moving from California to New York was a big change for me and I didn't fit in very well."

Already Holly's stunning looks had turned heads, resulting in print ads and commercials by the time she was ten. Meanwhile, Lauralei pursued a career as a singer and an actress. Holly along with her mother and new stepfather, who was a musician, lived in a series of studio apartments, one housing even so cramped that the only place to get some privacy was the bathroom. At one point all three lived with Holly's grandmother!
This kind of a lifestyle didn't leave the young girl untouched. She had some serious rebelling years. "I was the angriest little person imaginable. I woke up with a frown every morning. I barely talked and wore black all the time," Holly recalls. At fifteen she got her first tattoo, but the rebelling failed as her stepfather said to that: "Oh, I want one like that!". "I was the product of very young parents and they had wild ways," says Holly. "My mother was in a punk band. Rebelling would have been learning to play the piano."

Holly made her acting debut and obtained her SAG card when she appeared in Walls of Glass aka Flanagan in 1985. Before Holly began carving a name for herself as the kittenish Kimberly Brock, her career started with such film work as Debs Boon in Sweet Hearts Dance (1988), starring Don Johnson, Susan Sarandon and Jeff Daniels, a few uncredited roles, Kim in Simple Men (1992), Jennifer Campbell in Dr.Giggles (1992) and Diana in Chain of Desire (1992).

By all accounts Holly's big break came when she joined the cast of CBS's dramatic series Picket Fences as Tom Skerritt's and Kathy Baker's teenage daughter Kimberly Brock in 1992. At first the role nearly slipped away when the star producer David E Kelley turned her down, saying she didn't have "a big enough heart" to play Kimberly. Holly's gutsy attitude didn't let her not to reply with "If you're looking for someone with a big heart, then what the hell are you doing in New York?" Two weeks later she got the job.
Critics praised Picket Fences along with Holly and awards weren't slow to come. For her role in Picket Fences Holly won the Young Artist Award for Best Young Actress in a New Television Series in 1993. Unfortunately everything has a beginning and an end. So did Picket Fences. The show ran from 1992 to 1996, altogether 4 years.

1996 wasn't a great year for Holly on the whole. The show she worked on ended and on the top of that she divorced from her husband Bryan "Travis" Smith, with whom she had married in 1992 in a Las Vegas chapel. Just like her parents before her, she felt that they had been too young for a marriage.

More roles of low stature followed until Holly hit the jackpot again: TV's A Perfect Stranger (1994), Sins of Deadly Silence (1996), Love's Deadly Triangle: The Texas Cadet Murder (1997) and Daughters (1997). Just like any other young actress, Holly went through the age of tacky movies and nude scenes. Hers was in 1995 in A Reason to Believe. She didn't read the script and when she found out what was coming, it was too late to turn back. To Holly's misfortune screen captures of her 10-second topless shot showed up on the internet. "I never thought that this one shot of me taking my shirt off could be freeze-framed into 15 different pictures. All you had to do was search for my name and the first thing that came up was 'Holly Marie gets naked' . I was really lucky my pictures weren't getting 1,000 hits a day." says Holly Marie. Fortunately Alyssa Milano's mother, Lin Milano, who had experience with getting porn off the net was able to help. "The guys who posted it were like, "Yeah, we'll take them down, no problem." I guess that's the good part of being an under-rated, under-valued..."

Holly returned to series work when in 1998 her good friend Shannen Doherty told her about a new Aaron Spelling's show Charmed about three young sisters who happen to be witches and save the world on daily basis. At first Holly was supposed to be the free-spirited youngest sister Phoebe and Shannen Piper, but the girls felt that it didn't work and asked the producers to switch. And so it happened that Holly became the grounded middle-sibling Piper and soon Lori Rom joined the cast, but the rocky road wasn't over yet. After shooting the pilot Lori left the show. She was replaced with Alyssa Milano and the pilot was re-shot. For two years the show had a happy run. The rocks on the road appeared again during the shooting of the show's third season. Shannen and Alyssa had gone from friends to worst enemies. By the end of the season the situation had turned so bad that the two only spoke to each other when the camera was running. One of them had to go. The makers of the show decided that it had to be Shannen. In the season finale they killed off Doherty's character, the eldest sister Prue. Although Shannen and Alyssa fell out, Holly managed to maintain good relationships with both litigants and survived the change. Shannen was replaced by Rose McGowan as the long-lost youngest sister Paige.

Just how big impact Charmed would be having on Holly's life and family nobody could have been able to predict. By today, every member of her family has appeared at least once on Charmed. Holly's husband David Donoho was even the key grip of several episodes of Charmed. Before they got married on Valentine's Day in 2004, Holly was already expecting her first child, Finley who was born 10 weeks later on 26th of April.

When Charmed cast it's last spell on the 21st of May in 2006 after 8 whole seasons, also being the longest running show with female leads, Holly was pregnant again and Her second son was born on the 26th of October at 12:57 p.m. at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. Riley weighed in at 8½ lbs. and was 19 inches long. After the birth the proud father, David, told: "Everybody's great. Holly is tired, but she's fine. Riley came right out and as soon as he heard Holly's voice, he smiled. He has hair like Elvis – a full head of black hair. The doctor said he came out looking like a 2-year-old."