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Melissa Joan Hart

American actress

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 7, 2026
Entity authorityQ429777 ↗
Source-derived summary

Melissa Joan Hart (born April 18, 1976) is an American actress, director and producer. She had starring roles as the title characters in the sitcoms Clarissa Explains It All, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Melissa & Joey, and she appeared as Liz in No Good Nick. She has also appeared in the films Drive Me Crazy (1999), Nine Dead (2009), and God's Not Dead 2 (2016).

Early life

Hart was born in Smithtown, New York, the first child of Paula Hart (née Voje), a producer and talent manager, and William Hart, a carpenter, shellfish purveyor, oyster hatchery worker, and entrepreneur. Her maternal grandfather, Stanley John Voje, was a Navy veteran and Catholic.

Hart's parents had four other children after Melissa: Trisha, Elizabeth, Brian, and Emily, who are all in acting. Her parents divorced in the early 1990s, and she moved with her mother and siblings to New York City. In 1994, her mother married television executive Leslie Gilliams, who is best known for his appearance on Season 5 of MasterChef in 2014, when he finished in 3rd place. Hart has three half-sisters.

Career

Early career

Hart's career began at age four when she made a television commercial for a bathtub doll called Splashy.

Editorial summary

“Melissa Joan Hart” enters the record as american actress. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Melissa, Joan and Hart can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1976, 1999, 2009, 2016—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1976-04-18. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Melissa, Joan and Hart.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Melissa Joan Hart” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Melissa, Joan and Hart provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q429777. VIAF identifies the subject as 40602862. The Library of Congress control number is n00024702. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1999, 2009 and 2016.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Melissa Joan Hart”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Melissa Joan Hart primary sources, Melissa Joan Hart archive and Melissa research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Melissa Joan Hart”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Melissa Joan Hart” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.