Jessica Alba Trivia: 28 fascinating facts about the actress!

Jessica Alba is an American actress and businesswoman.

Let’s find out fun facts about her!

1. Jessica Marie Alba was born April 28, 1981 in Pomona, California.

2. Her parents are Catherine Louisa and Mark David Alba.

3. Her mother has Danish, Welsh, German, English, and French ancestry, while her paternal grandparents, who were born in California, were both the children of Mexican immigrants.

4. She has a younger brother, Joshua. Her third cousin, once removed, is writer Gustavo Arellano.

5. Her father’s Air Force career took the family to Biloxi, Mississippi, and Del Rio, Texas, before settling back in Claremont, California, when she was nine years old.

6. Alba has described her family as being a “very conservative family – a traditional, Catholic, Latin American family” and herself as very liberal; she says she had identified herself as a “feminist” as early as age five.

7. Alba’s early life was marked by a multitude of physical maladies. During childhood, she suffered from partially collapsed lungs twice, had pneumonia four to five times a year, as well as a ruptured appendix and a tonsillar cyst.

8. Alba became isolated from other children at school, because she was in the hospital so often due to her illnesses that no one knew her well enough to befriend her.

9. Alba has also had asthma since she was a child.

10. Alba has said that her family’s frequent moving also contributed to her isolation from her peers.

11. She has acknowledged that she suffered from obsessive–compulsive disorder during her childhood.

12. Alba graduated from Claremont High School at age 16, and she subsequently attended the Atlantic Theater Company.

13. Alba began her television and movie appearances at age 13 in Camp Nowhere and The Secret World of Alex Mack (1994).

14. She rose to prominence as the lead actress in the James Cameron television series Dark Angel (2000–02) when she was 19 years old.

15. Alba later appeared in Honey (2003), Sin City (2005), Fantastic Four (2005), Into the Blue (2005), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) and Good Luck Chuck (2007).

16. In January 2012, Alba co-founded The Honest Company, a consumer goods company that sells non-toxic household products, and owns 15 to 20 percent of the company.

17. She has won various awards for her acting, including the Choice Actress Teen Choice Award and Saturn Award for Best Actress on Television, and a Golden Globe nomination for her lead role in the television series Dark Angel.

18. Alba was raised as a Catholic throughout her teenage years, but left the church because she felt she was being judged for her appearance, explaining:

“Older men would hit on me, and my youth pastor said it was because I was wearing provocative clothing, when I wasn’t. It just made me feel like if I was in any way desirable to the opposite sex that it was my fault, and it made me ashamed of my body and being a woman”.

19. Alba also had objections to the church’s condemnations of premarital sex and homosexuality, and what she saw as a lack of strong female role models in the Bible, explaining “I thought it was a nice guide, but it certainly wasn’t how I was going to live my life.”

20. Her “religious devotion [began] to wane” at the age of 15 when she guest-starred as a teenager with gonorrhea in the throat in a 1996 episode of the television series Chicago Hope. Her friends at church reacted negatively to her role, making her lose faith in the church.

21. She has stated that she still holds her belief in God despite leaving the church.

22. While filming Dark Angel in January 2000, Alba began a three-year relationship with her co-star Michael Weatherly. Weatherly proposed to Alba on her twentieth birthday, which she accepted. In August 2003, Alba and Weatherly announced that they had ended their relationship.

23. In July 2007, Alba spoke out about the breakup, saying “I don’t know [why I got engaged]. I was a virgin. He was 12 years older than me. I thought he knew better. My parents weren’t happy. They’re really religious. They believe God wouldn’t allow the Bible to be written if it wasn’t what they are supposed to believe. I’m completely different.”

24. Alba had at one time said she envisioned a much older man as her ideal partner, making references to Morgan Freeman, Sean Connery, Robert Redford, and Michael Caine. She said, “I have this thing for older men. They’ve been around and know so much.”

25. Alba met Cash Warren, son of actor Michael Warren, while filming Fantastic Four in 2004. Alba married Warren in Los Angeles in May 2008. They have two daughters: Honor Marie Warren (born 2008) and Haven Garner Warren (born 2011).

26. The first pictures of Honor Marie appeared in the July 2008 issue of OK! magazine, which reportedly paid $1.5 million.

27. In 2014, Alba appeared in Henry Louis Gates’s genealogy series Finding Your Roots, where her lineage was traced back to the ancient Maya civilization. The show’s research indicated that the surname Alba did not come from a Spanish man, since her father’s direct paternal line (Y-DNA) was Haplogroup Q-L54, Indigenous in origin. Her father’s matrilineal line (Mtdna) showed Sephardi Jewish roots, and DNA testing revealed that lawyer Alan Dershowitz is a genetic relative of hers.

28. Jessica’s global admixture was 72.7% European, 22.5% East Asian and Native American, 2% Sub-Saharan African, 0.3% Middle Eastern and North African, 0.1% South Asian, and 2.4% “No Match”.