Biography

Menounos still owns the very first car she bought when she moved to Los Angeles: a now fully restored 1962 candy apple red Chevrolet Corvair convertible.

As she was caring for her mother, who has stage 4 brain cancer, Maria found out she was facing a health crisis of her own. In February 2014 Menounos started experiencing troubling symptoms. "I'd been getting lightheaded on set and having headaches," she tells PEOPLE in the magazine's exclusive new cover story. "My speech had gotten slurred and I was having difficulty reading the teleprompter". An MRI revealed Menounos had a golf-ball-size meningioma brain tumor that was pushing on her facial nerves. Menounos made an appointment with her mother's doctor, renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Keith L. Black, and they scheduled surgery for June 8-her 39th birthday. "He said, 'I'm 98 percent sure it's benign but we won't know until we get in there,'" she says. During the complex surgery, which lasted about seven hours, Dr. Black was able to remove 99.9 percent of the tumor, which was benign. "He said there's a six to seven percent chance that we'll see it come back," she says. "But I'll take those odds any day." Now back at home after a six-day hospital stay, Menounos is healing and spending time with her mother, Litsa, whose latest MRI shows that her cancer is stable.

Owns the solid gold and pearl-handled revolver that Elvis Presley gave to Jack Lord.

Fluent in the languages of Greek, English and Spanish.

She is of Greek descent.

I am honored to be a Bond girl and be a part of the Bond legacy, To star in a video game with Connery, the original Bond, is incredible.

Back in the day after I won my first pageant there was an agency that was getting me work on the side.

A lot of people didn't realize that I acted before I did anything else.

There's something about taking a film from concept to script, through production, and then to see the final thing happening in the edit phase. It's almost like a miracle in the making.

One of the first things I did was interview the President of the United States. Some people work their whole lives and can't interview someone of that stature.