Quicknation    Lara Croft

Images of Lara Croft: G Y AOL AV MSN Books of Lara Croft: B

Lara Croft results from: AltaVista A9 AOL Clusty Gigablast Google Lycos MSN Teoma Wisenut Yahoo

Lara Croft is a video game character, and the Amazonian heroine of the Tomb Raider series of video games, movies and comic books. In the movies, she is portrayed by actress Angelina Jolie.

table

Lara Croft, Duchess of Saint Bridget, is an eccentric and wealthy British aristocrat from the borough of Wimbledon, London. She is the daughter of Lord Henshingly Croft. Educated from the age of three by a private tutor, at the age of eleven she began at Wimbledon High School, and at sixteen moved to Gordonstoun. Her taste for adventure was first aroused upon reading an article on the archaeologist Professor Werner Von Croy in National Geographic, and she persuaded her father to allow her to accompany the archaeologist on his tour of Asia. She also became interested in mountain climbing during her time in Scotland.

At about the age of twenty, after completing her education at a Swiss finishing school she went on a skiing trip to the Himalaya. Their plane crashed en route to the destination; she was the only survivor. Her experience seemed to wake her up from the boring aristocratic life, and she chose to become a "tomb raider." In essence, she is for hire to recover lost artifacts, whether from tombs, or the clutches of selfish collectors. For this unorthodox career choice, she is disowned by upper-class British society. Typically, she is heavily armed with a variety of firearms.

Created by Toby Gard, the heroine of the video game series has spawned over six incarnations of the game, where the heroine must defeat ancient deities, spirits, evil gangsters, and even dinosaurs. games have been made for the PC, Mac, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Saturn, Dreamcast, N-Gage, Pocket PC, Game Boy Advance, and Game Boy Color. The seventh game in the series has been announced for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, Xbox 360, and PC. It is said the original name for Lara Croft was to be Laura Cruz. Because of the alike pronunciations, she is sometimes referred to as Laura.

. She has also been portrayed by models, including the actress Rhona Mitra and the current top model Jill De Jong. Despite some initial reservations, Jolie expressed interest in making a third movie, but the second film's box office failure led to these plans being cancelled. On February 14, 2006, it was announced that a previously unknown 20 year old sales assistant from London, Karima Adebibe, would star as the new Lara Croft model and would shorty begin a training program to play the role. Interestingly, Karima looks like an exact copy of the video game Lara Croft in publicity shots.

Some fans consider Lara's growing status as a sex symbol in the video game fandom through each progressive game sequel—with increasingly gratuitous artwork and advertisements—detrimental to the character, who gained more attention from her appearance than her tough-as-nails spirit and determination. In response to this, Lara has recently undergone a slight "redesign" for the sake of becoming more appealing to female gamers. Her chest size was reduced and her clothes were altered, although she is still notably unrealistic, especially in regard to her BMI.

Fans of Lara have been critical of the video games for portraying her in an increasingly bloodthirsty manner, and occasionally not giving players the option to avoid lethal force against human characters (in an example from was heavily criticized by some for showing Lara committing acts of murder against security guards and police[1]. An original novel based upon the character, (published January 2005) describes her once killing a man while kissing him and the book itself has an extremely high count; at one point she uses deadly force against a man for simply painting a nude portrait of herself.