Reid was born in Wyckoff, New Jersey, and is of Irish, English, Hungarian, French, and Italian descent. Reid began her career at the age of six in 1982 on the short-lived game show . As a child she had roles in a number of commercials for McDonald's, Crayola, and Jell-O. She grew up in New York City, and attended the Professional Children's School alongside such celebrities as Ben Taylor, Jerry O'Connell, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Macaulay Culkin. Reid spent the late 1990s appearing more often on the cover of tabloid magazines than on screen. Her extroverted social life soon gave her a reputation as a party girl — in fact, U.S. magazine already knew her as Bunny Lebowski. She has appeared as J.D.'s (Zach Braff) unfaithful girlfriend in the NBC comedy .

On the night of Thursday November 4, 2004, Reid was embarrassed by a wardrobe malfunction at a highly publicized photo shoot at P. Diddy's thirty-fifth birthday party at Cipriani's Restaurant in New York when her dress fell, exposing her left breast. It took a relatively long amount of time for Reid to notice the malfunction, which led some to suspect that she was inebriated. Scar tissue was visible around Reid's nipple, confirming rumors of breast implants. The photographs were widely distributed. In August 2005 she finally admitted having had her breasts augmented. [1]

Her half-hour television show on the E! network, premiered in September 2005, but was cancelled the following month. The show was an updated incarnation of E!'s popular series called "Wild On," where a celebrity host, or model, traveled to exotic locations to party with locals. Though "Taradise" was a commercial flop, it held a guilty pleasure appeal to many for its candid, on-location scenes of a drunken and increasingly portly Reid, juxtaposed against documentary commentary scenes of a sober and slimmed down Reid (that were clearly filmed later). Previously during the Summer of 2005 she was busy shooting "Incubus" in Romania, during which time she displayed her party behavior with daily appearances in clubs and casinos.

"At the end of a movie, all my outfits are missing. They even call: 'Tara, those were $700 shoes.' What are they going to do, search my house?"

"I can make a scene that's not supposed to be sexy, very sexy. It's a power you're born with. It's not a physical thing, it comes from inside. It's all in the eyes."

"I don't like the typical good-looking guy. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I like guys with love handles. When he doesn't care 100 percent about his , I don't have to obsess about mine. I hate a washboard stomach-does not turn me on."

"I hate being tickled. Sure, it makes me laugh, but when I get tickled, I get pissed off. I'm like a monkey when I get tickled - woo-hoo!"

"I just started making Bloody Marys. I always thought they looked gross, then I tasted one. There's an art to it, from the Tabasco to the Worcestershire."

"I like when a guy makes me feel like a woman and a little girl at the same time."

"I'm more of a jeans and T-shirt kind of girl."

"I'm not perfect, I do drink. I do smoke. Carson Daly can't go out and get messed up, he can't smoke in front of kids - he's the face of MTV, and he has to be good. But me? I can."

"Slasher movies are fun. You watch yourself get chopped to pieces, yet you're still alive. You see the blood on the axe and think, Holy **it, this is sick, but you kind of get over your fear of death."