Jessica Chastain

JESSICA CHASTAIN was raised in Northern California and attended high school there. She was born as Jessica M. Howard but adopted her mother’s maiden name at least as early as high school, according to the website chastaincentral.com.

Jessica has told a number of interviewers about the event that planted in her the desire to be an actress when she was just a child, “My grandmother took me to see David Cassidy in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and I thought, I want to be up there.”

In later interviews, the website said she shared more details, “We sat down and the play started and there was a girl of my age who opened this huge book and started narrating and I thought, ‘This is a job. She gets to wear cool costumes and this is what I am going to do.’ Ever since then I have always known I was going to be an actor.” She performed in plays in school and won some trophies, such as the District Middle School Dance Competition.”

According to her IMDb biography, she was in a dance troupe by age 13 and later began acting in Shakespearean plays around the bay area, such as Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Donna J. Sparks. Jessica, as Hero, is said to have had a nice quality of innocence, and one of the of the more rewarding scenes was when Hero is viciously and falsely accused of being a slut.

Jessica was the first of her family to graduate from college, and she did a Yoplait commercial just after finishing. A fellow actor suggested she consider Julliard in New York, and Jessica attended there as a drama major with the help of a scholarship from Robin Williams. She has described her over-the-top Julliard audition as Juliet (she must really like Juliet) in several places, “It’s a 14-year-old girl saying, ‘Hurry up, sun, go away, because then the night will be here, Romeo will show up and I will have sex.’ The language is very sexual: ‘Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-browed night; Give me my Romeo.’ It definitely builds into this climax of sensual language. So when I did the monologue, I remembered what it was like to be 14 and wanting to be a woman yesterday. By the end I was writhing on the floor and just went really out there.” After she finished her performance, she looked at the panel of older Julliard staff, and they were staring at her in shock. Michael Kahn, Juilliard’s venerable head of speech and drama, asked, “Did you have fun, Jessica?” And Jessica just smiled and said, “Yes I did.” Kahn responded, “OK, thank you very much.”

Upon arriving at Julliard, Jessica moved into the dorm with other first year students. She was awed by some of the people she saw at the school, such as Itzhak Perlman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Yo-Yo Ma. Ralph Fiennes came to speak to her class. She was also in New York during the 9/11 attacks.

During 2011, the media began using a special designation to describe what kind of girl Jessica is–the IT girl! Another term often used in the latter part of the year was ‘suddenly ubiquitous’. One writer commented that Jessica’s “abruptly ubiquitous face left a lot of moviegoers feeling as if they had been living under a rock. Rising talents…usually have origin stories, but Chastain just sprang, fully formed, onto casting lists.”

Information in this article was provided by ChastainCentral,com