Elisabetta Canalis- Italian actress

Elisabetta Canalis  (born 12 September 1978) is an Italian actress and showgirl . Canalis' father Cesare is a radiologist in University of Sassari's clinic, while her mother Bruna was an Italian teacher. She has a brother named Luigi, who is also a radiologist and was involved in a Switzerland debt scandal. Canalis was educated in Sassari, where she attended the "classical" highschool (Liceo classico), and then moved to Milan to study foreign languages at Università degli Studi di Milano, though she never graduated because she started to work as a dancer for Silvio Berlusconi's TV channel Canale 5 at the age of 21. 

Elisabetta Canalis was a dancer on the Canale 5 TV show Striscia la Notizia from 1999 to 2002. Canalis had minor roles in the filmsDeuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and Virgin Territory, a comedy produced by Roberto Cavalli. In 2005, she replaced a busy Michelle Hunziker in Love Bugs 2, the second season of the sit-com Love Bugs. In 2007, she co-hosted the annual Italian music festival, Festivalbar but the TV program closed. In 2009, she replaced a pregnant Elena Santarelli on the Italian version of Total Request Live, on MTV Italia. Elisabetta hosted the Trofeo Birra Moretti 2008, a summer football competition played between S.S.C. Napoli, A.C. Milan and Juventus.

In 2010 she played a recurring character in season 3 of the TNT series Leverage. In February 2011, she co-hosted the most important Italian song contest, Sanremo Music Festival with Gianni Morandi and Belen Rodriguez.She interviewed in the Festival Robert De Niro . Canalis appeared on the 13th season of Dancing with the Stars. She was paired with Valentin Chmerkovskiy and was the second to be eliminated on 27 September 2011. She was interviewed on the The Ellen DeGeneres Show in September 2011.^[14] Though she wears animal leather bags and shoes, she posed for PETA's "I'd Rather Go Naked than Wear Fur" campaign in 2011. For two nights, she co-hosted for the second time the Sanremo Music Festival 2012 and acted with the singer Adriano Celentano in the role of " Messy Italia".

In March 2015, she was elected Goodwill Ambassador UNICEF Italy.