Christina Hendricks

The US Trends | Christina Hendricks | Christina Hendricks is an Anglo-American actress known for her role as Joan Holloway in the AMC cable television series Mad Men, and as Saffron in Fox's short-lived series Firefly. Hendricks was named "the sexiest woman in the world" in 2010 in a poll of female readers taken by Esquire magazine.

Christina Rene Hendricks was born on May 3, 1975, in Knoxville, Tennessee. Christina Hendricks' mother was a psychologist and her father was a British-born forester who worked for the United States Forest Service. Shortly after Hendricks' birth, the family moved to Twin Falls, Idaho, a small, quiet town where one of the few activities available for children was community theater. "My mom got my brother and I involved in a community theater group, so we could create our own fun," Hendricks recalls. "And that's where it all started for me. I spent my whole childhood with this theater called J.U.M.P. Company: Junior Musical Playhouse. It was amazing how many talented kids there were in the group, and also how many people in the community jumped in to volunteer, to direct, to build sets, whatever needed to be done. We'd put on these shows at the community college, and half the town would show up! So it was great. It was the happiest time of my life."

When Christina Hendricks was 14 years old, her family moved to Fairfax, Virginia, where she attended Fairfax High School. An artsy kid in a school dominated by jocks and preps, Hendricks struggled to fit in. "I had the worst high school experience ever," she remembers. "People literally spit on me. I was a Goth girl, and in preppy Fairfax County, that did not go over very well. My friends and I were all weird theater people. Some of us were gay. And everyone just hated us." Hendricks dyed her hair purple and wore thick black lipstick. "My mother was mortified and kept telling me how horrible and ugly I looked, and strangers would walk by with a look of shock on their face," she says. "So I never felt pretty, you know. I just always felt awkward." Nevertheless, no amount of hair dye or dark makeup could obscure Hendricks' increasingly apparent beauty, and toward the end of high school a friend persuaded her to enter a modeling competition to appear on the cover of Seventeen magazine. "When I got the pictures back my mum and I started crying because I had no idea I could be pretty," she recalls. "It just sort of changed my perspective of myself."

Christina Hendricks did not win the contest but at the age of 19, after graduating high school, she moved to New York and began modeling professionally. Hendricks thoroughly enjoyed her time as a model. "I loved it a lot," she says. "I know a lot of girls who are like, 'Ugh, I hated it,' and I'm like, 'Really? You hated being paid to travel all around the world and have your picture taken? That must have been horrible for you.'" Hendricks refers to her time modeling as "boot camp," saying that it provided ample training for the cutthroat world of show business. "I don't think I'd have as thick a skin as an actress if I hadn't done the modeling," she said. "Because you get rejected seven times a day as a model and you're not even doing anything. That can either kill you in a month or, you know, build up a tolerance in you, and I think it helped me." After two years modeling in New York, Hendricks moved to London, where she also spent a year modeling. "I was there for the perfect time — 1996. It was huge for fashion and music and there was so much energy. It was Britpop-crazy and I'm the biggest Britpop fan."

Christina Hendricks left London at the end of the year and moved with her mother to Los Angeles to attempt to make the transition from model to actress. Two years later, in 1999, she landed her first acting roles: a small part in a TV movie called Sorority and a recurring role in the TV series Undressed. Still, it took Hendricks an entire decade in Hollywood to land anything more than small bit parts on television shows. Her most prominent acting credits during this period were recurring stints on Beggars and Choosers (2000-2001), ER (2002), Kevin Hill (2004-2005) and Life (2007-2008).

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