• Birthplace: Washington, District of Columbia, USA
• Age: 50
• Height: 164
• Weight: 0
• Website: N/A

Alyson Hannigan was born in Washington, D.C., to Emilie (Posner), a real estate agent, and Al Hannigan, a truck driver. She began her acting career in Atlanta at the young age of 4 in commercials sponsoring such companies as McDonald's, Six Flags, and Oreos. She is a seasoned television actress veteran, guest starring in Picket Fences (1992), Roseanne (1988), Touched by an Angel (1994) and the The Torkelsons (1991) before starring in her most notorious roles yet in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996) as "Willow Rosenberg" and How I Met Your Mother (2005) as "Lily Aldrin."

Alyson Lee Hannigan was born on March 24, 1974, in Washington, D.C. Of mixed Irish and Jewish descent, Hannigan's father, Albert, was an overnight truck driver, and her mother, Emilie, was a real estate agent. Her parents divorced when she was only two years old, and Hannigan and her mother moved to Atlanta, Georgia. Hannigan got her start in show business at a very young age, appearing in her first film—an instructional video for new parents called Active Parenting—before her first birthday.

While still a toddler, Hannigan appeared in dozens of print advertisements and developed a love for posing before the camera. "Whenever they needed a baby, they would put me in front of the camera, and I loved it," she says. Hannigan then moved into commercial acting. At the age of four, she appeared in her first commercial for Duncan Hines, and she later appeared in national TV commercials for Oreos and McDonald's as well.

Hannigan attended the Northside School of the Performing Arts in Atlanta, where she played clarinet in the band and also featured for the soccer team. At the age of 11, she and her mother moved to Los Angeles so she could pursue her budding acting career more seriously. Three years later, in 1988, a 14-year-old Hannigan made her film debut in the sci-fi comedy My Stepmother is an Alien.

For the next two years, Hannigan had a small but recurring role on the ABC fantasy sitcom Free Spirit. Still, at this point in her career parts were hard to come by, and Hannigan worked at a video store and as a babysitter to supplement her acting work. For a time she babysat the real-life daughters of Bob Saget, the legendary comedian and TV dad who would become her future costar on How I Met Your Mother. Hannigan graduated from North Hollywood High School in 1992 and enrolled at California State University, Northridge to study psychology. While taking classes at Northridge, Hannigan also continued to act, appearing in TV series such as Almost Home (1993) and Touched by an Angel (1994).