Jennifer Garner rocketed to stardom as Sydney Bristow, the multilingual, quick-thinking, high-kicking spy in the hit show Alias, which ended last year after five seasons. She won a Golden Globe, was nominated for four Emmys, married Ben Affleck and had a baby. Overall, the past few years have been good to the actress.
But the dimple-cheeked Southern belle (she was born in Texas but moved with her family to West Virginia at the age of four) is not concerned with Hollywood glitz, instead preferring to talk about breastfeeding, weaning and trepidation at the onset of the 'terrible twos'.
Since her daughter Violet was born almost two years ago, Garner has let her career take a back seat. It's been 'a perfect mom year', where she would hold meetings for her three-year-old production company, Vandalia Films, which has about six films in the pipeline, but would return home before Violet had woken from her nap.
But the script for The Kingdom, an action-thriller co-starring Jamie Foxx and Justin Bateman, lured Garner out of semi-retirement. The movie was filmed mostly in Arizona, although there was a two-week shoot in Abu Dhabi. When the US$80 million film was under way Violet was seven months old, but Garner was already in shape for her part as Janet Mayes, a member of an elite FBI squad sent to Saudi Arabia to find the perpetrators behind the bombing of an American facility. She was in such extreme-fighting mode, kicking and punching terrorists, that when her husband visited her on the set, he said: 'You're a freak.'
Garner has been lucky that her movie career has coincided with her television work.
Before Alias was on the air, she had minor roles in films such as Mr Magoo and The Pretender, before appearing in Dude, Where's My Car? She then played a nurse in Pearl Harbour, where she met Affleck for the first time. They worked together again in Daredevil. She strutted her stuff in 2005's disappointing Elektra and starred in the romantic comedy Catch and Release, which wasn't a big hit, either. But Juno, in which she plays a young woman trying to adopt a child, is getting great rave reviews, paving the way for Garner's future film projects - she has at least three lined up in the next two years.
