The star of the TV series Alias, Jennifer Garner first became a familiar face to viewers when she played the recurring role of Hannah Bibb in Felicity. Born April 17, 1972, in Houston, TX, and raised in Charleston, WV, Garner began appearing in television and film in the mid-1990s. Her first TV appearance was in a small role in Danielle Steel'sZoya. From there she went on to small parts in a number of other television shows, even landing a starring role on the series Significant Others. The series was cancelled after only one season and Garner was offered the role in Felicity, playing the girlfriend of Noel, the resident advisor.
From Significant Others, Garner moved on to a starring role in the TV series Time of Your Life, which was cancelled after two seasons.
In 2001, she won the starring role in Alias, playing graduate student Sydney Bristow, who leads a secret life as an international spy. She won the Golden Globe award for the role in 2001, and was nominated for an Emmy the following year.
Garner's other film roles include Catch Me If You Can (2002), Daredevil (2003), 13 Going on 30 (lead role, 2004), Elektra (2005) and Catch and Release (2007). She created a production company, Vandalia Films, in 2007.
Garner was married to Scott Foley, her co-star on Felicity; they divorced in 2004. In 2005, she married Ben Affleck — her costar in Pearl Harbor and Daredevil — and they have two daughters.
Best Known As: Superspy Sydney Bristow in TV's Alias
Jennifer Garner is the lean, athletic star of the action-adventure television series Alias (2001-06), in which she played American superspy Sydney Bristow. Garner began her acting career in New York in the mid-1990s, then moved to Los Angeles and won several small roles in television productions. Her regular appearances on TV's Felicity (1998) led to movie roles, including Dude, Where's My Car? (2000, with Ashton Kutcher) and Pearl Harbor (2001, starring Kate Beckinsale). More importantly, Felicity creator J. J. Abrams tapped Garner for the lead role in Alias (2001, co-starring Bradley Cooper), the hit show that made her a star. She made her way into feature films, including a small role in Catch Me If You Can (2002, starring Leonardo DiCaprio), and as comic heroine Elektra in Daredevil (2003, starring Ben Affleck) and Elektra (2005). Since then she's been a reliable lead in mostly romantic comedies, including 13 Going on 30 (2004, with Mark Ruffalo), Juno (2007, starring Ellen Page) and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009, starring Matthew McConaughey).
Garner married her Felicity co-star, Scott Foley, in 2000. They split up in 2003 and she was romantically linked to her Alias co-star, Michael Vartan. Garner began dating Ben Affleck, her co-star in Daredevil, in 2004, and on 29 June 2005 the two were married. They have two daughters.
Career Highlights: Juno, The Kingdom, Alias: Season 05
First Major Screen Credit: Rose Hill (1996)
Biography
While landing a guest spot on a hit television series would be a welcome event for most up-and-coming actresses, Jennifer Garner's brief run on Felicity proved especially fortunate for her -- thanks to her appearance on the show, she met her future husband, and the producer who would cast her in the leading role of the successful action/adventure series Alias.
Jennifer Garner was born in Houston, TX, in 1972; when she was very young, her family relocated to Charleston, WV, where she grew up. Garner was the second of three daughters, and early on developed an interest in ballet. After graduating from George Washington High School in Charleston, Garner attended Denison University in Granville, OH, where she became interested in drama, and eventually received a degree in theater. After college, Garner moved to New York and began auditioning for stage roles, landing her first part only a month after arriving in town in 1995 as an understudy in the Broadway production of A Month in the Country. Later that same year, Garner moved to Los Angeles and began working in television, making her screen debut in the made-for-TV movie Zoya. Over the next two years, Garner landed guest roles on several television shows, including Spin City and Law & Order, and small parts in several motion pictures, among them Deconstructing Harry, In Harm's Way, and Mr. Magoo.
1998 found Garner cast as the female lead on the short-lived Fox drama Significant Others, and while the show only aired for a little over a month, Garner fared much better with a showy recurring role on Felicity, where she played Hannah, the former girlfriend of Noel Crane, played by Scott Foley. Though Garner claims she had to go through five rounds of auditions before she was given the role, she certainly made an impression on co-star Foley; they soon began dating, and were married in the fall of 2000. Garner's work on Felicity helped win her a major supporting role on the television series Time of Your Life, a spin-off of Party of Five starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. The heavily promoted series was a ratings disappointment, but Garner received enthusiastic notices, and began winning film roles in high-profile projects such as Pearl Harbor and Dude, Where's My Car?
In 2000, J.J. Abrams, who produced Felicity, was preparing a new series for ABC about a female spy living a triple life as a college student and supposed bank employee, who is also a double agent working for the CIA. Abrams remembered Garner's impressive performance as Hannah, and cast her as Sydney Bristow in Alias. The show quickly became a success when it premiered in 2001, earning respectable ratings, strong reviews, and a devoted fan following who tuned in each week to see Garner beat up bad guys and don an impressive collection of slinky outfits. That same year, Garner also appeared opposite her husband, Foley, in a supporting role in the independent drama Rennie's Landing.
Riding high on the success of Alias with a Golden Globe Award in hand, Garner continued to grow as a big-screen presence. After a memorable appearance in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, Garner displayed the butt-kicking skills she honed on Alias, appearing as Elektra in the 2003 comic-book adaptation Daredevil. The next year, she took on her first big-screen starring role, playing an adolescent girl who wakes up to suddenly find herself all grown up in the romantic comedy 13 Going on 30. Sadly, also in 2004, Garner and husband Foley's marriage proved to be short-lived when they announced that they were getting a divorce.
While continuing to star on Alias, Garner next geared up to star in her own Daredevil spin-off film, appropriately called Elektra. Unfortunately, when the movie was released in 2005 it bombed at the box office and was panned by critics, though many nonetheless complimented Garner's strong performance. ~ All Movie Guide
Jennifer Anne Affleck[1] (née Garner; born April 17, 1972), known professionally as Jennifer Garner, is an American actress. Garner first gained recognition through television for her performance as CIA agent Sydney Bristow on the thriller drama series Alias, which aired on ABC for five seasons from 2001 to 2006. While working on Alias, she also gained work in movies such as Steven Spielberg's Catch Me if You Can, the big-budget epic Pearl Harbor, and Daredevil. Since then, Garner has appeared in supporting as well as lead roles on the big screen in projects including 13 Going on 30 and the sleeper hit Juno. She is married to actor and director Ben Affleck, with whom she has two daughters.
Garner was born the second of three daughters to Patricia Ann (née English), an English teacher from Oklahoma, and William John Garner, a chemical engineer at Union Carbide, in Houston, Texas. When she was four years old, her father's job with Union Carbide relocated her family to Princeton, West Virginia, and then later to Charleston, West Virginia, where Garner resided until her college years.[2] She has an older sister named Melissa Lynn Garner Wylie (born February 5, 1969), who resides in Boston, Massachusetts, and a younger sister, Susannah Kay Garner Carpenter (born January 24, 1975[3]), who is settled in Charleston, West Virginia, their hometown.
Garner's strict upbringing included going to church every Sunday, not wearing make-up and waiting till the age of sixteen to get her ears pierced, which, she later joked, made her family "just a step away from being Amish."[4][5][4] Garner began taking ballet lessons at the age of three and continued to dance throughout her youth, but she has claimed that she never harbored any ambitions of becoming a classical ballerina.[6]
In 1990, Garner graduated from George Washington High School in Charleston and enrolled at Denison University to study chemistry. Upon realizing that she enjoyed stage acting more than science, Garner changed her major to drama. She graduated from Denison, where she was initiated into the sorority Pi Beta Phi, in 1994 and decided to continue her drama education at the National Theater Institute in Waterford, Connecticut. In 1995, Garner started pursuing New York theater after visiting her friend, Clayton Kirlew, in New York City.
Career
While working in New York City in 1995, Garner earned $300 a week as an understudy in the play A Month in the Country for Roundabout Theatre Company. She was then cast in her first television role as part of a made-for-television movie Zoya, based on the Danielle Steel novel. In the late 1990s, she made brief appearances in individual episodes of Spin City and Law & Order while also securing roles in two short-lived television series, Significant Others and Time of Your Life.
Garner made her first big screen appearance of the 21st century in the comedy Dude, Where's My Car?, playing Ashton Kutcher's girlfriend. In 2001, she appeared as the supporting character of a nurse in the big-budget epic Pearl Harbor, starring her future husband Ben Affleck. Later in 2001, J. J. Abrams (who produced Felicity, where Garner had played a recurring role in previous years) approached Garner to audition for the role of Sydney Bristow in the spy drama Alias. After a successful audition, Garner was cast, and, right after the first handful of episodes of the series were aired, she won the award for "Best Actress in a Television Series — Drama" at the 2002 Golden Globes. Garner's salary for the show began at $45,000 an episode and rose to $150,000 per episode by the series' end. During the show's run, Garner received four consecutive Golden Globe as well as Emmy nominations for her lead performance. She won the "Actor Award" from the Screen Actors Guild in 2005. That same year, during the fourth season, Garner directed the Alias episode, "In Dreams", which aired in May, and during the same season, she also experienced nerve damage to her back.[7] She received producer credit during the series' final season. The series concluded in May 2006 after a fifth, abbreviated season (due to Garner's pregnancy, which was written into the storyline of the fifth season).
After the initial success of Alias, Garner returned to her film career with a small role in the Steven Spielberg film Catch Me if You Can, and starred alongside Ben Affleck as Elektra Natchios in the action movie Daredevil, an adaptation of the comic book. She showed her comedic side in the romantic comedy 13 Going on 30, which was well received both commercially and critically, and reprised her role as "Elektra" in the 2005 spin-off to Daredevil titled Elektra. Garner entered the Forbes' "Power 100" list of celebrities in 2005 at 70th place.[8] From June 2004 to June 2005, she earned an estimated US $14 million.[9]
Garner's next few films, Catch and Release (2007) and The Kingdom alongside Jamie Foxx, Jason Bateman and Ashraf Barhom, were box office failures. She then appeared in the Jason Reitman-directed comedy/drama feature Juno, which became a sleeper box office hit. After that film's premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Entertainment Weekly declared Garner's work the best female supporting performance of the festival, saying "The star of Alias and The Kingdom does no butt-kicking in this sweet comedy. Instead, as a young wife desperately hoping to adopt, she's funny, a bit tough, and unbelievably touching."[10] Instead of demanding her standard salary for the small independent film Juno, Garner had settled on percentage points based on the film's commercial returns. This gesture of goodwill earned her over $8.5 million when the film became a runaway success at the box office.[11]
Garner made her Broadway debut on November 1, 2007 by playing Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac alongside Kevin Kline at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway.[12] The show was originally set to run until December 23, 2007, but it was extended through January 6, 2008 due to the Broadway stagehand strike in late 2007.[13] For her portrayal of Roxanne, Garner won the 9th Annual broadway.com Audience Award for Favorite Actress in a Play.[14]
Personal life
On October 19, 2000, Garner married actor Scott Foley, whom she had met on the set of Felicity in 1998. After separating from Foley in March 2003, Garner filed for divorce in May 2003, citing irreconcilable differences.[15][16] Foley and Garner claimed that their Hollywood lifestyle was what led to the failure of their marriage and, according to Garner, they "really were victims of Hollywood."[17][18] The two were officially divorced on March 30, 2004. Following her divorce, in mid-2003, it was widely reported that Garner was dating Alias co-star Michael Vartan. Garner confirmed the relationship in August 2003, but never made any public appearances with Vartan.[19] The two broke up in the middle of the year 2004.[20][21][22]
Garner started dating her Daredevil co-star Ben Affleck in July 2004 and the two made their first public appearance at a Boston Red Sox game.[23] On Garner's 33rd birthday, while she was pregnant with his child, Affleck proposed to her with a 4.5 carats (900 mg) diamond ring from Harry Winston.[24] The couple married, when Garner was three months pregnant, on June 29, 2005 in a private ceremony, officiated by family friend Victor Garber,[25][26] at the Parrot Cay resort on the Turks and Caicos Islands.[27] Her pregnancy was incorporated into the plot of Alias,[28] with the season's episode order reduced from the initial 22 to 17 in order to let Garner go on maternity leave.[29] On December 1, 2005, Garner gave birth to their first daughter, Violet Anne Affleck.[30][31] The couple's second child, Seraphina Rose Elizabeth Affleck, was born on January 6, 2009.[32][33]
