Jennifer Garner was born Jennifer Anne Garner on April 17, 1972 in Houston, Texas. Garner spent nine years of her adolescence studying ballet and considers her dancing years as having been driven more by sheer determination and love of the stage rather than talent. She graduated from George Washington High School in Charleston and had planned on taking up drama at Yale but landed an acting job in New York City instead. She graduated with a theater degree from Ohio Denison University in Granville in 1994. She got her first major television break on the show Felicity, where she also met her first husband, actor Scott Foley. She skyrocketed to stardom in 2001 when she landed the lead role on Josh Abrams’ highly successful spy drama, Alias.
Sydney Bristow, played by Jennifer Garner on Alias, was recruited by a man named Arvin Sloane to become a CIA agent during her freshman year of college. After seven years of working under Sloane in what she believed was the CIA, she discovered that she was actually part of a terrorist organization known as SD-6. She also uncovered the true identity of her father as a seasoned government agent and her mother, as a rogue former KGB operator who has risen to the highest echelons of international espionage. Determined to avenge her fiancé, Danny’s death, at the hands of the scheming Sloane, Sydney became a double agent for the real CIA to help destroy and dismantle SD-6.
(Photo courtesy of ABC)