The most desired woman in the world who disappeared from Hollywood: why Jessica Alba abandoned her career at the peak of success.
The one who was one of the most popular young actresses of the beginning of the century left the industry without warning to take refuge in her family and in the business world. Tired of being “the girl in a bikini in the movies”, Alba now explains the reasons for her withdrawal.
There was no one more desired than her in the early years of the century. It didn’t matter which men’s magazine asked about it, Jessica Alba exercised an absolutist reign in those rankings of the most attractive women who ended up evaporating from the headlines thanks to the denunciations of systematic objectification. Alba herself also longed for that 2007 to get rid of the label “of sexy girl in a bikini from the movies“, which she achieved in just a few seconds captivating Bruce Willis, and so many other millions of viewers, with the magnetic “warm-up” -literally and figurative– from Nancy, the stripper from Sin City.
That same year, the Californian boasted of being at the top of her career, with up to five films released just a few months apart, and she seemed destined to be one of the great stars of the seventh art. However, her schedule dwindled without warning and the high expectations placed on her were reduced to the point of not having been able to recover the honeys of past success in almost fifteen years. An enigma made in Hollywood that her own protagonist has decided to decipher now.
Her role in ‘Sin City’ made Alba one of the most popular young actresses.
“I couldn’t go back to what I was doing before and be authentic. She could not. I didn’t care in the same way anymore.” In the ultra-competitive and self-centered entertainment industry, few actresses have dared to verbalize the reasons that can lead to placing a brilliant career as a global icon at the bottom of the priority list. In Alba’s case, it was the fear of relapsing into her childhood illnesses when she first became pregnant that led her to withdraw from the front line. “My mother had cancer at a very young age, barely 20 years old. I grew up with a chronic illness. I had five surgeries before I was 11. I had chronic allergies and was hospitalized a lot when I was a child, ”she confessed in an interview with the digital magazine Romper .
In her statements, the 39-year-old Californian associates the frenzy of the film industry with a weakening of her health. “I had a kind of revelation where I knew that I wanted to live and thrive and spend as much time as I could with this little person that I was bringing into the world, stay with her. My health matters and I want this girl to be healthy. It is very, very difficult to be happy when you don’t have that, ”said the actress, who last February also made public the thyroid cancer suffered by her father.
Alba is still a red carpet regular. In her picture, her with her husband, Cash Warren.
Jessica Alba kept her promise and, since she premiered films like The Devil Under the Skin in 2010 , she reduced her roles in Hollywood to small supporting roles or leading roles in low-budget films. None even came close to being labeled a box office or critical success, and at just 27 years old, the executives of the Los Angeles hills seemed to write off the interpreter who only a few years ago was the object of desire of all of Hollywood. She, aware of her professional depreciation, reaffirms her choice: “Frankly, she was at the top of my career, but my only motivation was health. I wasn’t asking myself, ‘Will they ever hire me again?’
Alba, who rose to fame in 2000 playing a genetically modified soldier in the James Cameron series Dark Angel , has also not shied away from offering her opinion, however controversial it may have been, in an industry that Historically, it has rewarded the most silent. When asked about her difficulty getting headlining jobs, she did not hesitate to criticize the ethnic stereotypes that are still in force in the industry.
“They told me, ‘You’re not Latin enough to play a Latina, and you’re not Caucasian enough to be the lead, so you’ll be the’ exotic,” she said in an interview with PopSugar.. He has not hesitated either in his denunciations of the sexual harassment suffered in the mecca of cinema – “I have suffered from everything. I’ve been here since I was twelve years old, so imagine”, he says–, nor in the bad behavior that Tim Story, director of what should have been the biggest blockbuster of his career, Fantastic Four , had during filming. “It made me think that neither my feelings nor myself as an actress were good enough.”
It was precisely on the set of that adaptation of the Marvel comics, back in 2005, where he met Cash Warren, a television producer who was then working as an assistant to the director of the superhero film. The couple married in 2008 and today they are the parents of two girls and a boy: Honor, Haven and Hayes; twelve, nine, and three years, respectively.
The Californian starred in ‘LA’s Finest’ alongside Gabrielle Union.
But the setbacks in her facet as an interpreter do not overshadow the professional success that the Californian has reaped in the last decade. Following in the footsteps of other stars of her generation such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Alba has managed to succeed in the business world thanks to The Honest Company, a company she founded in 2012 dedicated to the creation and sale of items for babies, women and the home, organic and without toxic components.
