Jessica Marie Alba (/ˈælbə/ AL-bə; born April 28, 1981) is an American actress and businesswoman. She began her television and film appearances at age 13 in Camp Nowhere and The Secret World of Alex Mack (1994), and rose to prominence at age 19 as the lead actress of the television series Dark Angel (2000–2002), for which she received a Golden Globe nomination.
Her big screen breakthrough came in Honey (2003). She soon established herself as a Hollywood actress, and has starred in numerous box office hits throughout her career, including Fantastic Four (2005), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), Good Luck Chuck (2007), The Eye (2008), Valentine's Day (2010), Little Fockers (2010), and Mechanic: Resurrection (2016). She is a frequent collaborator of director Robert Rodriguez, having starred in Sin City (2005), Machete (2010), Spy Kids: All the Time in the World (2011), Machete Kills (2013), and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014). From 2019 to 2020, Alba starred in the Spectrum action crime series L.A.'s Finest.
In 2011, Alba co-founded The Honest Company, a consumer goods company that sells baby, personal and household products. Magazines including Men's Health, Vanity Fair and FHM have included her on their lists of the world's most beautiful women.
Early life
Jessica Marie Alba was born in Pomona, California on April 28, 1981, to Catherine Louisa (née Jensen) and Mark David Alba. Her mother has Danish, Welsh, German, English and French ancestry, while her paternal grandparents, who were born in California, were children of Mexican immigrants. She has a younger brother, Joshua. Her third cousin, once removed, is writer Gustavo Arellano. Her father's Air Force career took the family to Biloxi, Mississippi, and Del Rio, Texas, before they settled in Claremont, California when she was nine years old. Alba has described her family as "very conservative… a traditional, Catholic, Latin American family", and herself as very liberal; she says she identified as a "feminist" as early as age five.
Alba's early life was marked by a multitude of physical maladies. During childhood, she suffered from pneumonia four to five times a year and had partially collapsed lungs twice as well as a ruptured appendix and tonsillar cyst. She has also had asthma since she was a child. She became isolated from other children at school because she was hospitalized so often, no one knew her well enough to befriend her. She has said that her family's frequent moving also contributed to her isolation from her peers. She graduated from Claremont High School at age 16 and subsequently attended the Atlantic Theater Company.
