Jennifer Garner
Jennifer Anne Garner is an American actress. Born in Houston, Texas and raised in Charleston, West Virginia, Garner studied theater at Denison University and began acting as an understudy for the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York City. She had a starring role on the Fox teen drama series Time of Your Life, and supporting roles in the films Pearl Harbor and Catch Me If You Can.
Garner rose to fame in the early 2000s for playing the secret agent Sydney Bristow in the ABC action thriller series Alias, for which she earned a Golden Globe, and four Primetime Emmy Award nominations, among other honors. She received further recognition for her starring roles in the romantic comedies 13 Going on 30, Juno, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Valentine's Day, and for playing Elektra in superhero films. Garner has since starred in the films Dallas Buyers Club ; Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day ; Love, Simon ; Peppermint ; Yes Day ; and The Adam Project. She starred in the Apple TV+ drama series The Last Thing He Told Me.
Aside from acting, Garner works as an advocate for early childhood education and serves on the board of Save the Children USA. She is also the co-founder and chief brand officer of Once Upon a Farm, an organic baby food company. Additionally, Garner is a vocal advocate for anti-paparazzi campaigns aimed at protecting the children of celebrities.
Early life
Jennifer Anne Garner was born on April 17, 1972, in Houston, Texas and moved to Charleston, West Virginia at age three. Her father, William John Garner, received his undergraduate and graduate degree in chemical engineering from Texas A&M University and worked as a chemical engineer for Union Carbide; her mother, Patricia Ann English, was a homemaker and later an English teacher at a local college. She has two sisters. Garner has described herself as a typical middle child who sought to differentiate herself from her accomplished older sister. While Garner did not grow up in a politically active household, her father was "very conservative" and her mother "quietly blue". She attended a local United Methodist Church every Sunday and went to Vacation Bible School. As teenagers, she and her sisters were not allowed to wear makeup, paint their nails, pierce their ears, or dye their hair; she has joked that her family's "take on the world" was "practically Amish".She attended George Washington High School in Charleston. In 1990, Garner enrolled at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where she changed her major from chemistry to theater and was a member of the sorority Pi Beta Phi. She spent the fall semester of 1993 studying at the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. During college summers, she worked summer stock theatre. In 1994, she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in theater performance.
Career
1990s
As a college student, Garner performed in summer stock theatre. In addition to performing, Garner helped sell tickets, build sets, and clean the venues. She worked at the Timber Lake Playhouse in Mount Carroll, Illinois, in 1992, the Barn Theatre in Augusta, Michigan, in 1993, and the Georgia Shakespeare Festival in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1994. Garner moved to New York City in 1995. During her first year in the city, Garner earned $150 per week as an understudy for a Roundabout Theatre Company production of A Month in the Country and made her first on-screen appearance as Melissa Gilbert's daughter in the romance miniseries Zoya. In 1996, she played an Amish woman in the television movie Harvest of Fire and a shopkeeper in the Western miniseries Dead Man's Walk. She appeared in the independent short film In Harm's Way and made one-off appearances in Spin City, and the legal dramas Swift Justice and Law & Order. Garner also supplemented her income by working as a hostess at a restaurant on the Upper West Side, as well as by doing some babysitting, specifically watching Madeleine Colbert, the daughter of Stephen and Evie Colbert.After moving to Los Angeles in 1997, Garner gained her first leading role in the television film Rose Hill and made her first feature film appearance in the period drama Washington Square. She appeared in the comedy film Mr. Magoo, the independent drama 1999 and Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry, though most of her performance was cut from the film. In 1998, Garner appeared in an episode of Fantasy Island and was cast as a series regular in the Fox drama Significant Others, but Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly thought there was "no center" to the character as played by Garner. Fox canceled the series after airing three of six filmed episodes. Garner's most significant role of 1998 was in J. J. Abrams' college drama series Felicity. In 1999, Garner was cast as a series regular in another Fox drama series, Time of Your Life, but it was canceled midway through the first season. Also in 1999, she appeared in the miniseries Aftershock: Earthquake in New York and in two episodes of the action drama series The Pretender.
2000s
Garner played the girlfriend of Ashton Kutcher's character in the comedy Dude, Where's My Car?. In 2001, she appeared briefly opposite her husband Scott Foley in the drama Stealing Time and had a small role as a nurse in the war epic Pearl Harbor. Also in 2001, Garner was cast as the star of the ABC action thriller series Alias. The show's creator, J. J. Abrams, wrote the part of Sydney Bristow with Garner in mind. Alias aired for five seasons from 2001 to 2006; Garner's salary began at $40,000 per episode and rose to $150,000 per episode by the series' end. During the show's run, Garner received the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series, in addition to four nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series.While Alias was airing, Garner continued to work in film intermittently. She had an "other-worldly" experience when Steven Spielberg called to offer her a role as a high-class call girl in the crime comedy-drama film Catch Me If You Can. After seeing her in Alias, Spielberg was sure that "she would be the next superstar". She filmed her scene opposite Leonardo DiCaprio during a one-day shoot. Garner's first co-starring film role was in the action superhero film Daredevil, in which she played Elektra to Ben Affleck's Daredevil. The physicality required for the role was something Garner had discovered "an aptitude for" through her work on Alias. Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times wrote that she "realizes Elektra more through movement than by way of her lumpy, obvious lines. She hasn't mastered the combat skill of tossing off bad material." While Daredevil received mixed reviews, it was a box office success. Also in 2003, she voiced herself in an episode of The Simpsons.
Garner's first leading film role, in the romantic comedy 13 Going on 30, was widely praised. She played a teenager who finds herself trapped in the body of a thirty-year-old. Garner chose Gary Winick to direct the film and they continued to look for other projects to do together until his death in 2011. Manohla Dargis of the Los Angeles Times found her to be "startling": "Whenever she's on screen you don't want to look anywhere else." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly called it an "utterly beguiling" performance, writing, "You can pinpoint the moment in it when Garner becomes a star." Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post remarked: "Garner is clearly cut out to be America's next Sweetheart; she has the same magic mix of allure and accessibility that the job calls for." 13 Going on 30 grossed $96 million worldwide. Garner reprised the character of Elektra in the 2005 Daredevil spin-off film Elektra; it was a box office and critical failure. Claudia Puig of USA Today concluded that Garner "is far more appealing when she's playing charming and adorable, as she did so winningly in 13 Going on 30". Garner next starred in the romantic drama Catch and Release. Although filmed in 2005 in between seasons of Alias, it was not released until early 2007 and failed to recoup its production budget. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone praised Garner's ability "to blend charm and gravity" but Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle felt that, while her "natural beauty and likability are still assets, seems occasionally challenged by what should be an easy role".
After a one-year break following the conclusion of Alias, her wedding to Affleck, and the birth of her first child, Garner returned to work in 2007. Her supporting role in Juno as a woman desperate to adopt a child was described by Kyle Buchanan of New York Magazine as a turning point in her career: "She came into the movie a steely figure, and left it as the mother you'd give your own child to ... Writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman expertly deploy Garner's innate humanity as a trump card." Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly said Garner had never "been lovelier or more affecting". Also that same year, she played an FBI investigator in the action thriller The Kingdom. She was nursing her baby during filming in Arizona and was hospitalized on two occasions with heatstroke.
In late 2007 and early 2008, Garner played Roxanne to Kevin Kline's Cyrano de Bergerac at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway. In preparation for the role, Garner worked with vocal and movement coaches and took French lessons. Ben Brantley of The New York Times described her performance as "captivating": "Ms. Garner, I am pleased to report, makes Roxane a girl worth pining over ... speaks Anthony Burgess's peppery rhymed translation with unaffected sprightliness. If she's a tad stilted in the big tragic finale, her comic timing is impeccable." The New Yorkers theater critic was impressed by her "feistiness" and "lightness of comic touch". The play was recorded before a live audience and aired on PBS in 2008. In 2007, Garner became a spokesperson of skin care brand Neutrogena.
Garner co-starred in two romantic comedies in 2009. She first appeared in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, portraying the childhood friend of a famous photographer and womanizer. While the film received lukewarm reviews, it grossed $102.2 million worldwide. Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune found Garner "easy to like and sharp with her timing"; he was disappointed to see her as "the love interest, which is not the same as a rounded character". Similarly, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times was dismayed to see Garner appear as "less a co-star than a place holder ".
Garner's second performance of 2009 was in comedian Ricky Gervais's directorial debut The Invention of Lying. Gervais was keen to cast Garner—"always happy and always pleasant to everyone"—against type. In the film, she played the love interest of the first human with the ability to lie in a world where people can only tell the truth. Reviews for the movie were mixed and it made $32.4 million worldwide. David Edelstein of New York Magazine said Garner "proves again what a dizzying comedienne she is. She looks as if the wheels in her head are not just turning but falling off and needing to be screwed back on," while Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle said Garner "has never been better onscreen... Garner gets to show a comic facility we haven't seen before."