Jessica Chastain Biography

CIVIL STATUS
Professions Actress, Producer , Executive Producer more
Birth Name Jessica Michelle Chastain
Nationality American
Born 24 March 1977 (Sacramento, California – United States)
BIOGRAPHY
Jessica Howard grew up in Northern California. At the age of 9, she discovered dance and joined a troupe until she was 13. Subsequently, she took her mother’s maiden name and began acting. After high school, she entered the Juilliard School, a major drama school in New York. Her first steps as an actress were on stage where she played Desdemona, among others, in William Shakespeare’s play, “Othello”.

The young aspiring actress also cut her teeth on television with small roles in ER, Veronica Mars and New York Court of Justice. In 2007, she played Jolene in Dan Ireland’s film of the same name. Then, in 2009, she played one of the main roles in Wilde Salome, the second feature film directed by Al Pacino, based on the work of Oscar Wilde. She then divided her time between New York and Los Angeles, between theater, film and television.

In 2011, she starred in Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life, in which she played Mrs. O’Brien, the wife of Brad Pitt’s character. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and propelled the actress’ career. The same year, she was the young version of the heroine of The Rachel Singer Affair, then the wife of Michael Shannon (II) in the paralyzing Take Shelter by Jeff Nichols, another sensation of the Cannes Film Festival. She ended 2011 on a high note, being nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Tate Taylor’s The Colour of Feelings.

Very much in demand, the actress then did dubbing for her first animated film, Madagascar 3, Bons Baisers D’Europe. Jessica Chastain returns in the flesh and alongside Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy in John Hillcoat’s Lawless Men, a violent gangster film set during Prohibition. She was also part of the team that hunted down Osama bin Laden in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), which earned her her her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress. She then changed her register and look with the Spanish horror film Mamá (2013), Andres Muschietti’s first feature film.

Jessica Chastain is on all fronts and her radiant hair doesn’t go unnoticed. In 2014, she joined Christopher Nolan’s ambitious Interstellar, where she played Matthew McConaughey’s daughter, before starring opposite James McAvoy in both parts of the romantic drama The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby. The same year, she played the tormented Mademoiselle Julie, in yet another adaptation of Strindberg’s play, this time directed by Liv Ullmann.

In the biopic The Big Game, Jessica Chastain steps into the shoes of Molly Bloom, a gifted young woman who has become the queen of a gigantic underground poker empire. In 2019, after playing the villain of X-Men: Dark Phoenix, she plays the main female character in It Chapter 2, adapted from Stephen King’s famous novel where a killer clown sows terror in a small town.

Then, the Sacramento native starred in two Jason Bourne-style action films: Tate Taylor’s Ava and Simon Kinberg’s 355. For the latter, of which she is the instigator and producer, she shares the bill with Diane Kruger, Penélope Cruz, Fan Bingbing and Lupita Nyong’o. Unfortunately, both of these films were abject failures. In the meantime, the actress has made a name for herself in a more intimate register: rare on television, in 2021, she starred with Oscar Isaac in the mini-series Scenes from a Marriage, a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from Married Life.

In 2022, she is unrecognizable in the biopic about American televangelist and singer Tammy Faye Messner, In the Eyes of Tammy Faye, for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress.