วันอาทิตย์ที่ 24 มิถุนายน พ.ศ. 2550

Jessica Alba


Jessica Marie Alba (born April 28, 1981) is an American actress. She is known for her roles in Dark Angel, Sin City, Fantastic Four and Into the Blue.

Biography

Early life :
Alba was born in Pomona, California, to Mark Alba, who is Mexican American (though both of Jessica Alba's paternal grandparents were born in California),and Catherine Jensen, who has French and Danish ancestry; the two married while in their teenage years.[ Her maternal grandfather was a Marine noncom for thirty years, serving in the Pacific during WWII, and later as Asst. Drum Major for the United States Marine Band. Alba was raised in an Air Force family, along with her brother, Joshua, an actor who appeared with her in the season one finale of Dark Angel, and her grandparents until she was 17 years old. Her father's Air Force career took the family to Biloxi, Mississippi and Del Rio, Texas, before they settled back in California.
She has also acknowledged suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder during childhood.

Career



Her first appearance on film was a small role in the 1994 feature Camp Nowhere as Gail. She was originally hired for two weeks but her role turned into a two month job when the actress in one of the prominent roles dropped out.
Alba appeared in two national TV commercials for Nintendo and J.C. Penney as a child; she was later featured in several independent films. She branched out into TV in 1994 with a recurring role as Jessica in three episodes of the Nickelodeon comedy series The Secret World of Alex Mack. She then performed the role of Maya in the first two seasons of the TV series Flipper. Under the tutelage of her lifeguard mother, Alba learned to swim before she could walk, and she was a PADI-certified scuba diver, skills which were put to use on the show, which was filmed in Australia.
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. In 1999, she appeared in the Randy Quaid comedy feature P.U.N.K.S.. After graduating from high school, 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.
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 came when writer/director James Cameron picked Alba from a pool of 1,200 candidates for the role of the genetically-engineered super-soldier, Max Guevara, on the FOX sci-fi TV series Dark Angel. Co-created by Cameron, Alba was the star in the series which ran for two seasons before being canceled in 2002. Since then her most notable roles have been as an aspiring dancer-choreographer in Honey, exotic dancer Nancy Callahan in Sin City and as the classic Marvel Comics character Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman in the Fantastic Four. Jessica went on to host the 2006 MTV Movie Awards and performed sketches spoofing the movies King Kong, Mission Impossible 3, and The Da Vinci Code.
On the cover of the March 2006 issue, Playboy magazine named Alba among its 25 Sexiest Celebrities, and the Sex Star of the Year. Alba was involved in litigation against Playboy for its use of her image (from a promotional shot for Into the Blue) without her consent, which she contends gave the appearance that she was featured in the issue in a "nude pictorial". However, she later dropped the lawsuit after receiving a personal apology from Playboy owner Hugh Hefner who agreed to make donations to two charities that Alba has supported.
In 2006, readers of Askmen.com voted Alba No. 1 on 99 Most Desirable Women, while in 2007, Maxim Magazine placed Alba on the number 2 spot of their Top 100, Both GQ and I Style magazines had Alba on their June covers, and in May, after eight million votes, FHM named Alba the winner as 2007’s Sexiest Woman in the World.
Alba fears being typecast as a sex kitten based on the bulk of parts offered to her."Somehow, I don't think this is happening to Natalie Portman," laments Alba. In the interview, Alba says she wants to be taken seriously as an actress but believes she needs to do movies that she would otherwise not be interested in to build her career, stating that eventually she hopes to be more selective in her film projects.

Personal life

Alba has revealed that she envisions a much older man as her ideal partner, making references to Morgan Freeman, Sean Connery, Robert Redford, and Michael Caine. "I have this thing for older men. They've been around and know so much."
Regarding children, Alba said, "I'm really girly when it comes to kids. I've been surrounded by kids my whole life because I'm the oldest of 15 cousins — I've been changing diapers since I was six. I want to have a couple, for sure".
She has a tattoo of a daisy with a ladybird on the back of her neck, the Sanskrit symbol for the lotus flower, padma, on her wrist, and a lower back tattoo of a bow.

Filmography

2007 : Sin City 2, The Eye 2 Part 2, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, The Eye, The Ten, Bill, Good Luck Chuck, Awake.

2005 : Into the Blue, Fantastic Four, Sin City, Honey, The Sleeping Dictionary,

2000–2002 : Dark Angel.

2000 : Paranoid .

1999 : Idle Hands, Never Been Kissed, P.U.N.K.S.

1996 : Too Soon for Jeff.

1995–1996 : Flipper .

1995 : Venus Rising, Young Eve .

1994: Camp Nowhere.


Awards

2000: Saturn Award for Best Actress on Television — Dark Angel
2001: TV Guide Awards for Breakout Star of the Year — Dark Angel
2001: Teen Choice Awards for Choice Actress — Dark Angel
2006: (Maxim) top 100- Most beautiful woman alive
2006: MTV Movie Awards 2006 for Sexiest Performance - Sin City
2007: Spike TV Guys' Choice Awards, June 13, 2007. Named "Hottest Jessica".


Avril Lavigne


Avril Ramona Lavigne-Whibley (born September 27, 1984) is a Canadian rock singer and musician. She has sold over twenty-six million albums worldwide. In 2006, Canadian Business Magazine ranked her the seventh most powerful Canadian in Hollywood. Although her parents are of French origins, she doesn't speak French and her name is usually pronounced in an anglicized way as "La-Veen" (in French it is commonly pronounced). Avril is French for "April", while la vigne means "the vine" or "the vineyard".
Lavigne's debut album,
Let Go, was released in 2002. Her second and third albums, Under My Skin (2004) and The Best Damn Thing (2007), respectively, reached number one on the U.S. Billboard 200. Lavigne has scored three number one songs worldwide to date and a total of nine top ten hits, including "Complicated," "Sk8er Boi," "I'm with You," "My Happy Ending," "Nobody's Home," "Keep Holding On," and "Girlfriend."

Background

Avril Lavigne was born in
Belleville, Ontario, Canada, to a French-born father, John, and a Franco-Ontarian mother, Judy. Both parents are Catholic and she had a Catholic upbringing. Avril's musical talent was first spotted at the age of two when her mother says Avril began singing along with her on church songs. The family moved to Napanee, Ontario, when Lavigne was five years old.
In 1998, Lavigne won a competition to sing with fellow Canadian singer
Shania Twain on her first major concert tour. She appeared alongside Twain at her concert in Ottawa, appearing on stage to sing "What Made You Say That". She was discovered by her first professional manager, Cliff Fabri, while singing country covers at a Chapters bookstore in Kingston, Ontario. During a performance with the Lennox Community Theatre, Lavigne was spotted by local folk singer Steve Medd (a relation of the influential Canadian journalist, Ben Medd), who invited her to sing on his song "Touch the Sky" for his 1999 album Quinte Spirit. She also sang on "Temple of Life" and "Two Rivers" for his follow up album, My Window to You, in 2000.
At the age of sixteen she was signed by Ken Krongard, the
artists-and-repertoire (A&R) representative of Arista Records, who invited the head of Arista, Antonio "L.A." Reid, to hear her sing at the New York City studio of producer Peter Zizzo. She then completed work on her first album.

Music career

Let Go (2002–2004)

Let Go was released on June 4, 2002 in the United States, reaching number two there and number one in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. This made Lavigne the youngest female soloist to have a number-one album in the UK up until that time.
Just over one month after its release, "Let Go" reached
multi-platinum status in late-August, and was certified triple platinum two weeks after. Before the end of 2002, just six months after its debut, it was certified four times platinum by the RIAA. It sold a total of 13,197,000 copies worldwide. It was the best selling album of the year for a female artist and for a debut album in 2002.
Lavigne was named "
Best New Artist" at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards, won four Juno Awards in 2003 (out of six nominations), received a World Music Award for "World's Best-Selling Canadian Singer", and was nominated for eight Grammy Awards, including "Song of the Year" for "Complicated" and "Best New Artist".

Under My Skin (2004–2005)

Lavigne's second album,

Under My Skin, was released on May 25, 2004, in the U.S. It debuted at number one in the U.S., the UK, Germany, Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Ireland, Thailand, Korea and Hong Kong and sold more than 380,000 copies in the U.S. in its first week. Lavigne wrote most of the album with Canadian singer-songwriter Chantal Kreviazuk, though some tracks were co-written by Ben Moody (formerly of Evanescence), Butch Walker of Marvellous 3, and her former lead guitarist Evan Taubenfeld. Kreviazuk's husband, Our Lady Peace front man Raine Maida, co-produced the album with Butch Walker and Don Gilmore.
Lavigne won two World Music Awards in 2004 for "World's Best Pop/Rock Artist" and "World's Best-Selling Canadian Artist". She received five Juno Award nominations in 2005, picking up three, including "Fan Choice Award", "Artist of the Year", and "Pop Album of the Year". She won the award for "Favourite Female Singer" at the eighteenth Annual
Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards. Lavigne co-wrote "Breakaway" with Matthew Gerard, which was recorded by Kelly Clarkson for the soundtrack to the film The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004). "Breakaway" was later included on Clarkson's second album, Breakaway, being released as the album's first single. The song peaked inside the U.S. top ten and provided Clarkson with a substantial hit.
Lavigne was touring throughout most of 2005, and pursuing her acting and modelling careers. She represented Canada at the closing ceremony of the
2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, performing her song "Who Knows" during the eight minutes of the Vancouver 2010 portion.

The Best Damn Thing (2006–present


Lavigne's third album,
The Best Damn Thing, was released on April 17, 2007 and debuted at number one in the U.S. The album was produced by Dr. Luke, Lavigne's husband Deryck Whibley, Rob Cavallo, Butch Walker and Lavigne. Travis Barker recorded drums for the record. The first single from the album was "Girlfriend", which became Lavigne's first single to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Girlfriend has been performed in many places including at the Logies in Australia. It is now also available in many languages. On Ryan Seacrest's radio show Lavigne said that "When You're Gone" would be the second single.
Lavigne has been doing a small tour to promote The Best Damn Thing, with tickets available only to members of her fan club. She began the tour in
Calgary, Alberta, and played for a crowd of around two hundred. This show was aired on television on April 2, 2007, on the CBC Network.
Avril Lavigne also recorded a cover for the song 'Imagine', by
John Lennon, as her collaboration on the album "Instant Karma: Save Darfur".

Personal life

It has been revealed that Lavigne is a vegetarian. In the January 2003 issue of
Seventeen magazine, she admitted to "snagging a bite of Matt's cheeseburgers every now and again." Also in a recent interview, she said she prefers not to eat meat, but will not say she's a vegetarian "in case anyone caught her eating meat". In an interview with the magazine live, it is stated: "It goes without saying that Lavigne is a vegetarian".
As a teenager she would hang out at the La Pizzeria restaurant in
Napanee, Ontario. In her Under My Skin Bonez Documentary, she has stated that pizza with olive toppings is her favourite food, although she doesn't eat it too much because pizza is detrimental to her voice. Since her rise to fame, the restaurant has named a pizza after Lavigne that contains her favourite toppings and there is a guest book for fans to sign that Lavigne picks up when she visits friends and family in her home town.
Lavigne has a star
tattooed on the inside of her left wrist that matches the style of the one used for her first album artwork. It was created at the same time as friend and musical associate Ben Moody's identical tattoo. In late 2004, she had a small pink heart-shaped tattoo featuring the letter 'D' applied to her right wrist — thought to be a reference to husband Deryck Whibley, with whom she has bought a house in Bel-Air, previously owned by another famous couple: Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler.
Lavigne was romantically linked to her former guitarist
Jesse Colburn, but despite rumors, she did not have a relationship with another former guitarist, Evan Taubenfeld. However, Taubenfeld still considers Lavigne his "dearest friend in the whole world" as said on a recent Q&A on his band's official website. In a J-14 magazine from 2004, she talks about her first kiss being when she was fourteen years old.
In February 2004, she began dating fellow Canadian singer
Deryck Whibley, the lead singer/guitarist of pop punk band Sum 41. On June 27, 2005, Lavigne and Whibley became engaged. Whibley proposed to Lavigne by surprising her with a trip to Venice, a gondola ride, and then a romantic picnic.
The couple married in a Catholic ceremony attended by about 100 guests on
July 15, 2006 at a private estate in the California coastal city of Montecito. When asked if they were ready for kids the couple said "not right now but somewhere down the road."

Fan's web link : www.avrillavigne.com