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Jessica Marie Alba (born April 28, 1981)
is an American actress. She is best known for her roles
in Dark Angel, Sin City, Fantastic Four and Into the
Blue.
Early life: Jessica Alba was born in Pomona,
California, to Mark Alba (who is of Mexican descent),
and Catherine Jensen (who is of French and Danish
ancestry). Her maternal grandfather was a Marine noncom
for 30 years, serving in the Pacific during WWII, and
later as Asst. Drum Major for the United States Marine
Band.
Alba was raised in an Air Force family,
along with her brother, Joshua, an actor who appeared
with her in the season one finale of Dark Angel, and her
grandparents until she was 17 years old. Her father's
Air Force career took the family to Biloxi, Mississippi
and Del Rio, Texas, before they settled back in
California.
Alba's early life was marked by a multitude of physical
maladies; she suffered collapsed lungs twice, had
pneumonia 4 to 5 times a year, a burst appendix, a cyst
on her tonsils, and asthma.[citation needed] She has
also acknowledged suffering from obsessive-compulsive
disorder during childhood. This served to isolate her
from other children at school because, as she says, she
was in the hospital so often that no one knew her well
enough to befriend her. Her health improved, however,
when her family moved to California.
Career: Alba had expressed interest in acting
since the age of five. She took her first acting class
at age twelve, and an acting agent signed her nine
months later. Her first appearance on film was a small
role in the 1994 feature Camp Nowhere as Gail. She was
originally hired for two weeks but her role turned into
a two month job when the actress in one of the prominent
roles dropped out.
A young Alba appeared in two national TV commercials for
Nintendo and J.C. Penney; she was later featured in
several independent films. She branched out into TV in
1994 with a recurring role as the young snob, Jessica,
in three episodes of the Nickelodeon comedy series The
Secret World of Alex Mack. She then performed the role
of Maya in the first two seasons of the TV series
Flipper. Under the tutelage of her lifeguard mother,
Alba learned to swim before she could walk, and she was
a PADI-certified scuba diver, skills which were put to
use on the show, which was filmed in Australia.
In 1998, she appeared as Melissa Hauer in a first-season
episode of the Steven Bochco crime-drama Brooklyn South,
as Leanne in two episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 and as
Layla in an episode of The Love Boat: The Next Wave. In
1999, she appeared in the Randy Quaid comedy feature
P.U.N.K.S..
After graduating from high school, Alba studied acting
with William H. Macy and his wife, Felicity Huffman, at
the Atlantic Theater Company, which was developed by
Macy and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and film
director, David Mamet.
Alba rose to greater prominence in Hollywood in 1999
after appearing as a member of a snobby high school
clique in the Drew Barrymore romantic comedy Never Been
Kissed, and as the female lead in the 1999 comedy-horror
film Idle Hands, opposite Devon Sawa. Her big break came
when writer/director James Cameron picked Alba from a
pool of 1,200 candidates for the role of the
genetically-engineered super-soldier, Max Guevara, on
the FOX sci-fi TV series Dark Angel. Co-created by
Cameron, Alba was the star in the series which ran for
two seasons before being canceled in 2002. Since then
her most notable roles have been as an aspiring
dancer-choreographer in Honey, exotic dancer Nancy
Callahan in Sin City and as the classic Marvel Comics
character Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman in the
Fantastic Four. Jessica went on to host the 2006 MTV
Movie Awards and performed sketches spoofing the movies
King Kong, Mission Impossible 3, and The Da Vinci Code.
On the cover of the March 2006 issue, Playboy magazine
named Alba among its 25 Sexiest Celebrities, and the Sex
Star of the Year. Alba was involved in litigation
against Playboy for its use of her image (from a
promotional shot for Into the Blue) without her consent,
which she contends gave the appearance that she was
featured in the issue in a "nude pictorial".
However, she later dropped the lawsuit after receiving a
personal apology from Playboy owner Hugh Hefner who
agreed to make donations to two charities that Alba has
supported.
One of the crop of bright-eyed, dewy-skinned young
actors to attain teen idoldom and a regular paycheck
during the late 1990s, Jessica Alba closed out the
century as one of Hollywood's more promising new
talents.
Born in Pomona, California, on April 28, 1981, Alba,
whose father was in the Air Force, moved with her family
to Biloxi, Mississippi, when she was an infant, but she
eventually moved back to California nine years later.
It was back in California that she embarked on an acting
career; having been in love with the idea of acting
since she was five, Alba took her first acting class at
the age of 12, and nine months later, she landed her
first agent.
She got her start on television, making appearances on
shows like Beverly Hills 90210, and she made her film
debut in the 1994 kids comedy Camp Nowhere.
Originally cast in a minor role in the film, she got her
first big break when the principal actress dropped out
and she was asked to take over. Following her debut,
Alba did a great deal of work on television.
She got her first substantial film role as the object of
the protagonist's disastrous affection in the teen
horror comedy Idle Hands in 1999; that same year, she
played one of the nasty popular girls who terrorize Drew
Barrymore in the romantic comedy Never Been Kissed.
The following year Alba made waves on the small screen
when she was cast in the much hyped Fox series Dark
Angel. Executive produced by James Cameron, the rising
starlet was cast as a genetically-engeneered woman who
escapes from the lab and joins a cyberjournalist named
Logan Cale (Michael Weatherly) in his neverending fight
against a crime in a post-apocalyptic future. Though the
series was cancelled after two seasons, Alba continued
to appear in such features as Paranoid (2000) and The
Sleeping Dictionary (2003).
In 2006, readers of Askmen.com voted Ms. Alba No. 1 on
99 Most Desirable Women, while in 2007, Maxim Magazine
placed Alba on the number 2 spot of their Top 100, GQ
magazine had Alba on its June cover, and in May, after
eight million votes, FHM named Alba the winner as
2007’s Sexiest Woman in the World.
Apparently, Alba fears being typecast as a sex kitten
based on the bulk of parts offered to her.
"Somehow, I don't think this is happening to
Natalie Portman," laments Alba. In the interview,
Alba says she wants to be taken seriously as an actress
but believes she needs to do movies that she would
otherwise not be interested in to build her career,
stating that eventually she hopes to be more selective
in her film projects.
Personal life: Alba began dating her Dark Angel
co-star, American actor Michael Weatherly, in 2001 and
they became engaged before their break-up in 2003. Later
that year she dated Spanish golfer Sergio García for a
brief period. In January 2005, she began dating Cash
Warren, a director's assistant on Fantastic Four, whom
she met during filming.
Alba has revealed that she envisions a much older man as
her ideal partner, making references to Morgan Freeman,
Sean Connery, Robert Redford, and Michael Caine. "I
have this thing for older men. They've been around and
know so much."
Regarding children, Alba said, "I'm really girly
when it comes to kids. I've been surrounded by kids my
whole life because I'm the oldest of 15 cousins — I've
been changing diapers since I was six. I want to have a
couple, for sure". In 2005, prior to the birth of
her brother's child, Alba said she was starting a
children's clothing line: "About four of my
girlfriends have babies so they have no time for me. I
figure if I can do baby clothes maybe they'll have more
time to hang out!"
She has a tattoo of a daisy with a ladybird on the back
of her neck, the Sanskrit symbol for the lotus flower,
padma, on her wrist, and a lower back tattoo of a bow.
Religion: In her adolescence, Alba became a
born-again Christian, but left the church - “
"'when older men would hit on me, and my youth
pastor said it was because I was wearing provocative
clothing, when I wasn't. It just made me feel like if I
was in any way desirable to the opposite sex that it was
my fault, and it made me ashamed of my body and being a
woman.' She also [...] disagrees with the church's
condemnations of premarital sex and homosexuality, and
was bothered by the lack of strong female role models in
the Bible. '[…] it certainly wasn't how I was going to
live my life.'" ”
As the daughter of conservative parents, Alba, whose
grandparents did not allow her to wear a bathing suit
around the house, maintains a no-nudity clause in her
contract, though she has claimed she had been open to
the possibility of appearing nude in Sin City. She
remarked of a GQ shoot in which she was scantily clad:
"They didn't want me to wear the granny panties,
but I said, 'If I'm gonna be topless I need to wear
granny panties".
Alba was given the option to appear naked by the film's
directors, Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez but
declined the offer saying, "I don't do nudity. I
just don't. Maybe that makes me a bad actress. Maybe I
won't get hired in some things. But I have too much
anxiety." |
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