Discovered in a restaurant in Iowa City, Ashton Kutcher was encouraged to enter a modeling contest that won him a trip to New York, a move that would jump-start his career. Upon his arrival in the big city, the tall (6'3"), dark-haired Kutcher was signed to an agency and modeled in runway shows in Milan and Paris and was featured in advertisements for Calvin Klein Jeans. Acting inevitably beckoned, and he made his film debut in "Distance", an NYU student production, and appeared in a nationwide Pizza Hut TV commercial.

Just a year after arriving in NYC from the tiny farm community of Homestead, Iowa, the young actor could be seen as a regular on Fox's "That '70s Show" (1998-), a role he landed after impressing producers with his fresh-faced enthusiasm. Far from his lovable but dopey character of Michael Kelso, Kutcher studied biochemical engineering at the University of Iowa, working as a cereal dust sweeper in the General Mills factory in Cedar Rapids to finance his education. He made the move to the big screen with a small role in "Coming Soon" (1999), starring Gaby Hoffman and Mia Farrow, followed by a turn in the its-so-stupid-its fun comedy "Dude, Where's My Car" (2000), opposite Sean William Scott, a film that has gone on the enjoy something of a cult following. He also had a role in the failed Western "Texas Rangers" (2001).

In 2003, Kutcher paired up with Brittany Murphy for the feature film "Just Married." Kutcher and Murphy, who were romantically linked during publicity for the film, played a newlywed couple in the highly uneven romantic comedy. That film–which coincided with the debut of the Kutcher-created MTV hidden camera show "Punk'd" (MTV, 2003-2004), which featured Kutcher and a cast of pranksters pulling outrageous hoaxes on his young Hollywood pals–helped ignite Kutcher's celebrity status and the media was suddenly following his every move, especially after he embarked on a very high-profile–and some claimed publicity-orchestrated–May-December romance with actress Demi Moore, 15 years his senior. His next 2003 release was "My Boss' Daughter," a film shot two years earlier and pulled from the shelf for release after Kutcher's ascent. In the middling comedy, Kutcher plays a young professional who hopes to earn points with his boss by housesitting for him an becomes romantically entangled with his sexy daughter (Tara Reid). Just as Kutcher claimed to pull the plug on early "Punk'd"–partially to work on developing a new MTV series and partially to avoid irritating his Hollywood victims–he had an amusingly effective uncredited cameo in the Steve Martin-Bonnie Hunt remake of "Cheaper By the Dozen" (2003) as their daughter Piper Perabo's vain boyfriend, but he made a shaky entry in dramatic territory in the critically slammed "The Butterfly Effect" (2004) playing a college student who troubled childhood memories send him on a timeline-altering journey in an effort to improve his friends' lives.

"Punk'd" returned with a new round of victims in 2005 and Kutcher re-upped for an extra season of "That 70s Show" to see the series through to the end, even as his movie career coninued to flourish. He teamed with Bernie Mac for "Guess Who?" (2005), a broad-comedy reversal of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" with Mac as a stern black father who disapproves of his daughter's engagement to Kutcher's white goofball. Within weeks of the release of that film, which failed to shake up the box office, Kutcher delivered his most mature and charming performance yet in the romantic comedy "A Lot Like Love" (2005), in which he plays an earnest young man with ambitious plans for his life who finds himself divereted every few years by his encounters with a edgy, romantically challenged aspiring actress (Amanda Peet) who, though their timing always seems to be off, just might be his soul mate. In the meantime on the small screen, as executive producer he launched another successful unscripted series on The WB: "Beauty and the Geek" (2005 – ) mismatched seven brilliant but socially awkward men with seven gorgeous but "academically challenged" women and put them through various competitive phases in hopes of coming up with a couple that was both bright and beautiful. He capped the busy year by marrying Moore in September 2005 in a traditional Kabbalah ceremony.

Perhaps inspired by his own romance, shortly after the wedding it was announced Kutcher would produce the sitcom "30 Year Old Grandpa" for Fox, about a younger man who marries an older woman and becomes stepfather to her children who are almost the same age as him, and he tweaked the much publicized convivality between himself and Moore's ex Bruce Willis by having Willis guest-star on "The 70s Show." He next teamed with director Andrew Davis for the action drama "The Guardian" (lensed 2006) playing a rebellious Coast Guard enlistee who has to contend with a legendary rescue swimmer (Kevin Costner).