Jessica Chastain | Biography, Movies, & Oscar (2024)

Jessica Chastain (born March 24, 1977, Sacramento, California, U.S.) is an American actress who is known for the luminous authenticity of her performances in a variety of roles. She specializes in playing flawed but strong women.

Chastain was born to teen parents and raised by her mother, a vegan chef, and, later, her stepfather, a firefighter. She became interested in acting as a child after her grandmother took her to see a play. She struggled in high school, but in 1998 she graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. That year she made her professional debut in a stage production of Romeo and Juliet in Mountain View, California. She then moved to New York City to enroll in the Juilliard School (B.F.A., 2003), after which she relocated to Los Angeles to pursue a film career.

For several years Chastain alternated guest appearances in television shows with stage work. Notably, she starred with Al Pacino in a Los Angeles production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (2006). In 2008 she made her film debut, cast in the title role of Jolene. The following year she played Desdemona in an Off-Broadway production of Othello. She shared a role with Helen Mirren in the thriller The Debt (2010), about Mossad agents haunted by their past. Chastain’s true breakthrough came in 2011, when she appeared in several movies, most notably Terrence Malick’s meditation The Tree of Life and the blockbuster The Help. In the latter, Chastain portrayed an ostracized housewife who hires an African American maid (Octavia Spencer) to fool her husband into thinking that she knows how to cook and do housework. For her performance, Chastain earned an Academy Award nomination.

Chastain’s credits in 2012 included Lawless, about Depression-era bootleggers in rural Virginia, and Kathryn Bigelow’s thriller Zero Dark Thirty, in which the actress played a CIA analyst who helps find Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the September 11 attacks; for her work in the latter, she garnered another Oscar nod. Chastain continued to show her range, starring in the horror film Mama (2013) and taking on disparate roles in Liv Ullmann’s Miss Julie, from the August Strindberg play; the gangster movie A Most Violent Year; and Christopher Nolan’s powerful science-fiction drama Interstellar (all 2014).

Chastain next played the head of a mission to Mars that is forced to abandon one crew member (Matt Damon) on the planet in The Martian (2015). In 2016 she was cast as the wife of the title character (Chris Hemsworth) in the fairy-tale-based The Huntsman: Winter’s War and won praise for her portrayal of a driven and powerful lobbyist in Miss Sloane. She chose to work with female directors for her next two movies—Niki Caro’s The Zookeeper’s Wife, in which a Warsaw couple uses a zoo to help Jews escape Nazis during World War II, and Woman Walks Ahead, Susanna White’s biopic about a white woman who became involved in the Lakota struggle for land rights in the late 19th century (both 2017).

Chastain later appeared in the franchise film X-Men: Dark Phoenix and the horror movie It Chapter Two (both 2019). In 2020 she starred in the crime drama Ava. The following year she and Oscar Isaac portrayed a couple whose relationship is falling apart in the TV miniseries Scenes from a Marriage, a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 series. Also in 2021 she appeared as the title character in the biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye, about Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, married televangelists who were brought down by scandal. For her performance, Chastain earned her first Oscar, for best actress. In the espionage thriller The 355 (2022), she was part of an all-star cast that included Lupita Nyong’o and Penélope Cruz.