Sarah Jessica Parker

Sarah Jessica Parker

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Birth name: Sarah Jessica Parker
Date of birth: 25 March 1965
Place of birth: Nelsonville, Ohio, USA
Nickname: SJP
Height: 5′ 4″ (1.63 m) 
Spouse: Matthew Broderick (19 May 1997 – present) 1 child

Famous Quote: “I have a team of style experts for being Carrie, but I am not Carrie. I’m not even much of a shopper. I don’t feel I need a lot of clothes. But I work in an industry where appearance is everything and sometimes I have to work hard at looking good. When I go to a premiere I like to borrow lovely clothes and shoes from designers. It’s like the library: if you return them in good condition, you get to borrow more. I’m very lucky.”

Contact Address and Autograph: Addresses and fan mail information

Sarah Jessica Parker
PO Box 69646
Los Angeles, CA 90069
USA 

Biography:  Sarah Jessica Parker (born March 25, 1965) is an American actress and producer, with a portfolio of television, film, and theater performances. She is best known for her role as Carrie Bradshaw, a newspaper journalist, on the HBO television series Sex and the City, for which she won four Golden Globe Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and two Emmy Awards. A professional actress since the age of 10, Sarah Jessica Parker was one of rare few who made the rocky transition from cute kid to gawky teen, fully breaking the rules by ending up as, not only a respected adult actress, but an influential fashion icon as well. Parker’s likeability, quick comic wit, and “realness” were key factors in her enduring appeal, and for her early roles in family dramas and teen romps, she earned a reputation for being “the smart one” and the “independent spirit.” 

Her role as a thirty-something freewheeling relationship columnist navigating Manhattan’s dating scene on HBO’s acclaimed “Sex and the City” (1998-2004) certainly brought her the most fans and international attention as well as multiple Emmy and Golden Globe Awards but Parker also scored her share of box office hits with romantic comedies like “Honeymoon in Vegas” (1992) and “Failure to Launch” (2006). And the girl who began her career on stage never strayed far from it, earning multiple Drama Desk award nominations and appearing on Broadway in “How to Succeed in Business without Even Trying” and the Tony-nominated revival of “Once Upon a Mattress.” The stylish New Yorker also made a permanent mark on the fashion world with the launch of her own clothing line, Bitten, and a pair of fragrances.

Parker was born in Nelsonville, Ohio, the daughter of Barbara, a nursery school operator and teacher, and Steven Parker, an entrepreneur and journalist. Parker’s father, a native of Brooklyn, was Jewish, the original family surname being “Bar-Kahn” (“son of Kohen”); Parker has said of herself, “I always just considered myself a Jew”. Parker’s parents divorced early on in Parker’s life and her mother remarried Paul Forste. Parker grew up with her mother, stepfather, and seven siblings (three from her parents’ marriage, and four from her mother’s second marriage). 

As a young girl, she trained in singing and ballet, soon being cast in the Broadway production of The Innocents. Her family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and then to Dobbs Ferry, New York, near New York City, where Parker was developing her career as a child actress. In 1977, the family moved to the newly opened planned community on Roosevelt Island, in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, and later to Manhattan proper; her parents later moved to Englewood, New Jersey where she attended Dwight Morrow High School.

Parker attended the School for Creative and Performing Arts, the School of American Ballet and the Professional Children’s School, and later Dwight Morrow High School. She and four siblings appeared in a revival of The Sound of Music, and Parker went on to the new 1977-81 Broadway musical Annie first in the small role of “July,” and then succeeding Andrea McArdle and Shelley Bruce in the lead role of the plucky Depression-era orphan, beginning March 6, 1979. Parker held the role for a year.

In 1982, Parker was cast as the co-lead of the CBS-TV sitcom Square Pegs. The show lasted only one season before being canceled by the network, but Parker’s performance, as a shy, misfit teen who showed hidden depths, was critically well-received. In the three years that followed, she was cast in four films the most significant of those being Footloose in 1984 and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, co-starring Helen Hunt, in 1985. Also that year, she became romantically involved with actor Robert Downey Jr., whom she met on the set of Firstborn and with whom she lived until 1991; during their relationship, Downey had a drug problem, and Parker has commented that she thought that she was “the person holding him together”. During the “Annie” days, the Parker-Forste family relocated to the New York area to accommodate their brood’s blossoming show business careers. Parker landed a few spots on kids’ TV shows, including the PBS science program “3-2-1 Contact” before snaring a high profile role in the talked-about ABC movie “My Body, My Child” (1982) starring Vanessa Redgrave. In 1983, Parker took the lead as a teen coping with the death of her mother in the emotionally wrenching “Somewhere Tomorrow,” which led to her casting as bookish bean-pole Patty Greene on the above-average sitcom “Square Pegs” (CBS, 1982-83). “Square Pegs” marked Parker’s first taste of nationwide notice, but unfortunately the highly-acclaimed show failed to find an audience that first season and was cancelled. 

But Parker was soon snapped up to reprise her comic sidekick persona in a string of films, including the 1980s pop culture landmark “Footloose” (1984) and Michael Apted’s domestic drama “First Born” (1984), where she met troubled long-term boyfriend, Robert Downey Jr. In 1986, Parker appeared in the cult classic Flight of the Navigator, a Disney science fiction film about a boy, David, who is relativistically transported in time by an alien spacecraft eight years into the future without aging.

By the early 1990s, Parker’s career was gaining momentum. In 1991, she appeared in a supporting role in the romantic comedy, L.A. Story; both the movie and her performance garnered positive reviews. The following year she landed an important starring role in the well-received film Honeymoon in Vegas, co-starring Nicolas Cage. but in 1990, she won acclaim for her deftly comic portrayal of flaky, pirouetting SanDeE*, stealing every scene opposite Steve Martin in his “L.A. Story” (1991). She moved up to leading lady status for the wildly popular madcap comedy “Honeymoon in Vegas” (1992), playing an unhappy fiancée forced to spend time with a wealthy older man (James Caan) after her husband-to-be (Nicholas Cage) loses her in a poker match. Having ended her long-term relationship with Downey prior to filming due to excessive drug problems, Parker and Cage were rumored to have enjoyed an off-screen romance while shooting in tropical Hawaii. 

Parker’s film career kept going strong, thanks to her new image as a fun and flirty modern woman and the sexiest of three kooky witches in the Disney comic fantasy “Hocus Pocus” (1993). Proving her versatility, she was featured opposite Bruce Willis in the actioner “Striking Distance” (1993) and played against Johnny Depp’s “Ed Wood” (1994) as his leading lady and love interest, Dolores Fuller, in Tim Burton’s hilarious offbeat biopic of the B-director. In one of her best screen roles, she starred as a young woman afraid of commitment in “Miami Rhapsody” (1995). Her 1993 role in the film Hocus Pocus was a higher grosser at the box office but received negative reviews. The following year, she appeared opposite Johnny Depp in the critically acclaimed movie Ed Wood. The film Miami Rhapsody, in 1995, saw her back on familiar territory with more romantic comedy material and a leading role. She appeared in another Tim Burton-directed movie, Mars Attacks!, The First Wives Club, and The Substance of Fire, in which she reprised her 1991 stage role, in 1996.

In 1997, she appeared as Francesca Lanfield, a washed-up former child actress, in the comedy Til There Was You. Later that year, the script for an HBO drama/comedy series titled Sex and the City was sent to Parker; the show’s creator, Darren Star, was determined that she be cast in his project. Despite some early doubts about being cast in a long-term television series, Parker agreed to star.

The show proved to be an instant success, raising Parker’s profile considerably. Despite the show’s increasingly risqué storylines, Parker retained the strict no-nudity clause in her contract throughout the show’s six-season run. Parker became a producer for the show starting with its third season. In 2004, Parker won an Emmy award for her lead role (after five consecutive losses). Many gambling and betting establishments stopped taking bets on her Emmy victory, because it was so widely predicted that she would win. Parker has since stated that she will “never do a television show again”, although she will co-executive produce a new HBO series based on Washingtonienne, but will not star in it. Parker went on to serve as producer and finally executive producer of the monster hit, in addition to excelling as the center of the ensemble, earning numerous awards for her nuanced portrayal of the extroverted but introspective columnist. She took home the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 2001 and 2004, and collected Golden Globes in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2004. She recovered with a well-cast role in the ensemble of David Mamet’s minor comedy “State and Main” (2000), playing a self-obsessed, manipulative actress in the acclaimed chronicle of a small-town movie shoot. The romantic comedy whodunit “Life Without Dick” (2002) co-starring Harry Connick, Jr., went straight-to-video despite a promising onscreen pairing, but Parker proved to be box office gold in the screwball holiday comedy “The Family Stone” (2005). Critics singled her out for her performance as the high-powered girlfriend of the eldest son in a bohemian family, whose introduction at the family’s annual gathering causes awkwardness, confusion and ultimately hostility. Parker followed up with another comedy that neared the $100 million mark, co-starring as the frustrated suitor of a perpetually adolescent Matthew McConaughey in “Failure to Launch” (2006).

Thanks to her trend-setting character’s fashion savvy, Parker also become one of the hottest style icons of the late 1990s and early 2000s, known for her excellent taste, avant-garde accessories and always fabulous footwear – courtesy mainly of the show’s stylist, the outlandish Patricia Field. Some of Carrie’s biggest fashion statements included making hip for the masses, “ghetto” gold necklaces with initial pendants, Manolo Blahnik shoes and skimpy shorts as everyday street wear.

After Sex and the City ended in 2004, rumors of a film version circulated and it has since been revealed that a script had been completed for such a project. However, Parker commented that it would likely never be made. Two years later, however, preparations were resumed. The film is currently in post-production, and is scheduled to be released in May 2008. In addition to work in movies and television, Parker is also a respected stage actor, having appeared in well-reviewed lead roles in the off-Broadway play Sylvia, alongside husband Matthew Broderick in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and the Tony Award-nominated Once Upon A Mattress, as Princess Winifred the Woebegone.

In December 2005, Parker appeared in her first theatrical film in several years, The Family Stone; she received a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress – Comedy for the role. Her next film, the romantic comedy Failure to Launch, co-starring Matthew McConaughey, was released on March 10, 2006 and opened at #1 in the North American box office, grossing slightly over $24 million in its opening weekend,[9] despite mediocre reviews. Parker’s work as a producer continues with the independent film Spinning Into Butter, based on the Rebecca Gilman play, which she will also star in. Parker was initially set to star in Vacancy, along with her co-star from The Family Stone, Luke Wilson, but she dropped out in favor of other projects. Kate Beckinsale later won the role.

Parker has become very influential in the world of fashion. In 2000, she hosted the MTV Movie Awards and appeared in no fewer than 15 different costumes throughout the show. She has also become the face of many of the world’s biggest fashion brands through her work in a variety of advertising campaigns. In August 2003, Parker signed a highly lucrative deal with Garnier to appear in television and print advertising promoting their Nutrisse hair products. In 2004, she fronted an international campaign by Gap, but her contract with the clothing giant was abruptly terminated in spring 2005 in favor of British soul singer Joss Stone. A friend of Parker’s commented to the press that, “Sarah’s spring campaign for Gap has only just started, and she feels the announcement of her replacement in the same week that the new ads are appearing is a bit of a snub”.

In addition to her advertising work, Parker released her own fragrance in 2005 called “Lovely”. In March 2007, Parker announced the launch of her own fashion line, Bitten, in partnership with discount clothing chain Steve & Barry’s. The line, which features hundreds of clothing items and accessories under $20, launched on June 7, 2007, exclusively at Steve and Barry’s. In July 2007, following the enormous success of “Lovely,” Parker released her second fragrance “Covet.” In 2007 Sarah was a guest on Project Runway for the second challenge.

As her career continued to blossom into the 1990s, she met journalist John Kennedy Jr. and dated him for several months. Prior to this, Parker had a serious relationship with Robert Downey Jr. She was also romantically linked to singer-songwriter Joshua Kadison in the early 1990s, who described their tumultuous relationship and their cat Moses in the song “Jessie” on the album Painted Desert Serenade.

On May 19, 1997, she married actor Matthew Broderick, to whom she was introduced by her brother. The couple married in a civil ceremony in a historic synagogue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that is no longer used as a house of worship; both Parker and Broderick (who each have one Jewish parent) consider themselves to be “culturally Jewish.” Parker has also defended the state of Israel. “I feel defensive when people say, ‘How can Israel go in with tanks?’, she says, “What are they supposed to do? Children are being killed by people willing to strap bombs to their bodies and walk into the public market. So Israel’s response to this is to protect its people.” The couple’s first child, son James Wilkie Broderick, was born on October 28, 2002. He was named after Broderick’s father, the distinguished Irish-American actor James Broderick. His middle name is that of author Wilkie Collins, an author Broderick and Parker greatly admire.

Parker and Broderick live in New York City and frequent the arts. Parker and Broderick also spend a considerable amount of time at their holiday home in County Donegal, Republic of Ireland where Broderick spent his summers as a child. Parker is a prominent member of the Hollywood’s Women’s Political Committee and is UNICEF’s Representative for the Performing Arts; in 2006, she traveled to Liberia as a UNICEF celebrity ambassador, and has commented that, “It’s a place that gets little or no attention, so we’re going to try and bring some attention to it.” She is currently a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for the United States. As of 2008, she lives in New York City with her husband and son. All are left-handed.

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