MOVING WITH confidence

Jennifer Garner - best known for her memorable roles on screen, including 2000s espionage thriller series Alias and her most recent movie, Family Switch - wears many hats. As a mother of three, she juggles a fast-paced career in Hollywood, raising a family and co-running her company, Once Upon A Farm

- SAVANNA DOUGLAS

Jennifer grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, with her two sisters. Her father worked as a chemical engineer, and her mother was a homemaker and an English teacher. As a child, she fostered a passion for the performing arts, including an extensive 10-year commitment to ballet and musical theatre, which sparked her interest in performing. Long before she became a star, though, Jennifer was a little girl with big dreams, raised by a conservative middle-class family.

‘My mom grew up on a farm in Oklahoma. Her mom was brilliant at canning, at making something stretch, at finding a way to make it work. They would sell eggs on the corner to people driving past. My mom makes it sound like it was fun: “Don’t go making a sob story out of my life”. But she lived in a house with no running water, her clothing made from repurposed calico feed sacks.’

Jennifer’s parents would eventually spend their life savings sending their three daughters to college, and when she announced that she would change her major from chemistry to theatre, they accepted her dreams.

‘They never tried to define my life for me,’ she says. ‘My mom was just like, “Go ahead and study what you love. Then you’ll figure it out,”’ she said in an interview with Town & Country.

BECOMING AN ACTOR

Finding her feet in the small town of Charleston, Jennifer grew a knack for entertaining a crowd – especially when it came to telling ‘tall tales’ – a West Virginia talent she had spent her younger years perfecting for school talent shows.