She has been listed in the "Hot 100" section of Maxim magazine every year from 2003 to 2007, and was voted "Sexiest Woman in the World" by FHM in 2007. In March 2007, a picture of her was used on the cover of Playboy. Playboy did not ask her if they could use the picture or tell her they were going to use it. This caused a lawsuit that was later dropped. Alba has won several awards for her acting. These awards include the "Choice Actress" award at the Teen Choice Award and a Saturn Award. Both of these awards were for her acting in the series Dark Angel.
Alba wanted to act since she was five. She took her first acting class at age twelve. An acting agent signed her nine months later. Her first movie work was a small role in the 1994 movie Camp Nowhere. At first, she was only hired for two weeks but ended up working for two months because another actress dropped out.
Alba starred in two national television commercials when she was a child. One of these was for Nintendo and the other was for J.C. Penney. She played Jessica in three episodes of the Nickelodeon comedy series The Secret World of Alex Mack.Alba was then Maya in the television series Flipper. Her mother was a lifeguard and had taught Jessica to swim before she could walk. She is a certified scuba diver.
In 1998, she acted in Brooklyn South, in two episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210 and in an episode of The Love Boat: The Next Wave. After Alba graduated from high school, she studied acting with William H. Macy and his wife, Felicity Huffman, at the Atlantic Theater Company.
She became more famous in Hollywood in 1999 after acting in the Drew Barrymore romantic comedy Never Been Kissed, and as the main female character in the 1999 comedy-horror movie Idle Hands. She was chosen from a group of 1,200 actresses for the role of the genetically-engineered soldier, on the FOX sci-fi television series Dark Angel. The series ran for two seasons from 2000 until 2002. Alba was nominated for a Golden Globe for her work on that series. When she trained to be in Dark Angel, Alba had to exercise very much and she starved herself. She said "A lot of girls have eating disorders and I did too. I got obsessed with it." She also had obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks. She said she has been cooking for herself since the age of twelve so she would not become as fat as her family members.
Some of Alba's most famous movie roles are a dancer in Sin City and as Marvel Comics character Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman in the Fantastic Four. She also acted in Into the Blue in 2005 and Good Luck Chuck a few years later. In 2008, Alba played her first horror-movie role in The Eye, a remake of the Hong Kong original. In February, she hosted an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences's ceremony. Later in the year, she starred in The Love Guru.
