Jessica Alba

Jessica Marie Alba, born April 28, 1981, is an American actress. She is perhaps best known for her roles in Dark Angel, Honey, Sin City and the Fantastic Four.

Alba was born in Pomona, California to Mark Alba and Cathy Jensen. Her father is a Mexican American, while her maternal grandfather was of Danish descent and her Canadian maternal grandmother was of French, Irish and Italian descent. Alba was raised in an Air Force family, living with her heavily Catholic parents,[1] her brother Joshua, and her grandparents until she was sixteen. She grew up a sports fanatic. Her father's Air Force career took the family to Biloxi, Mississippi, and Del Rio, Texas, before they settled back in California when she was nine. Alba's early life had been marked by a multitude of physical maladies, as she suffered collapsed lungs twice, had pneumonia 4-5 times a year, a burst appendix, a cyst on her tonsils, and asthma. This served to isolate her from other children at school because, as she claims, she was in the hospital so often that no one knew her well enough to befriend her. She also revealed on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno that she suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder as a child. Her health improved, however, when her family moved to California.

Alba had expressed interest in acting since the age of five. She took her first acting class at age twelve, and she was signed by an acting agent nine months later.
Alba's first appearance in film was a small role in the 1994 feature Camp Nowhere, as Gail. She was originally hired for two weeks but her role soon turned into a two month job when the actress in one of the more prominent roles in the film dropped out, and Jessica was picked to replace her because her hair matched that of the original actress.
Young Jessica appeared in two national TV commercials for Nintendo and J.C. Penney, and later she was featured in several independent films. She branched out into TV in 1994 with a recurring role as the insufferable 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, Jessica had learned to swim before she could walk, and she was a PADI-certified scuba diver, skills which were put to good use on the show, which was filmed in Australia. In 1995 she appeared in the film Venus Rising as Young Eve.

After graduating from high school at the age of sixteen, 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.
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.
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 may have been as the star of the Fox sci-fi TV series Dark Angel, which was co-created by writer/director James Cameron, who picked Alba from a pool of 1,200 candidates for the role of the genetically-engineered super-soldier, Max Guevera. The show ran for two seasons before being canceled in 2002. Since then her most notable roles have been as an aspiring dancer/choreographer in Honey, the exotic dancer Nancy Callahan in Sin City, and as the classic Marvel Comics character Sue Storm as The Invisible Woman in the Fantastic Four.
Alba's most prominent award nomination to date is that of a Golden Globe for "Lead Actress in a Drama Series" (TV) during the first season of Dark Angel.

She has stated that despite being an ambitious actress who desires the level of fame enjoyed by stars like Tom Cruise, she once told James Cameron during filming on Dark Angel that she did not want to direct because it appeared to be too difficult an undertaking, but he responded with the prediction that she would end up directing sooner than she expected.
According to some sources, she fears being typecast as a sex kitten. But she said, "Somehow, I don't think this is happening to Natalie Portman." 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.