Jessica Alba is a Mexican-American actress. Her roles in movies such as Idle Hands, and her starring role in the TV series Dark Angel, has given her greaqt reknown. She got her first starring movie role in Honey, and went on to appear in prominent roles in Sin City and Fantastic Four.
Jessica 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 Alba was picked to replace her because her hair matched that of the original actress.
Jessica Alba appeared in two national TV commercials for Nintendo and J.C. Penney, and later was featured in several independent films. She branched out into TV in 1994 with a recurring role as insufferable young snob Jessica in three episodes of the popular Nickelodeon comedy series The Secret World of Alex Mack. She then won the role of Maya in the first two seasons of the TV series Flipper. After graduating from high school at age 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. Jessica 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 popular 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 genetically-engineered super soldier Max Guevera. The show ran for two seasons before being cancelled in 2002. Since then her most notable roles have been as an aspiring dancer/choreographer in Honey, the stripper Nancy Callahan in Sin City, and as the classic Marvel Comics character Invisible Woman in Fantastic Four.
Alba’s most serious award nomination to date is that of a Golden Globe for “Lead Actress in a Drama Series” during the first season of Dark Angel.
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