Happy birthday to Reese Witherspoon! The American actress of Scottish heritage is one of the world's biggest movie stars. She is an Academy Award winner and has starred in box office successes like Legally Blonde, Election, Walk the Line and Pleasantville. Forbes magazine listed her among the World's 100 Most Powerful Women in 2019. Reese is proud of her heritage and was thrilled to be chosen as the voice of Merida, a princess from the Scottish Highlands, in the animated film Brave. She sheepishly admitted in a 2017 interview that her Scottish accent was so bad that she pulled herself off the film! Reese’s Scottish ancestry can be traced back to an Edinburgh-born Presbyterian minister. John Witherspoon emigrated to America in 1768. He became the president of Princeton university and was one of only two Scottish signatories on the American Declaration of Independence. In modern times, he become the subject of controversy when it was discovered he owned slaves and voted against the ...