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.
Early life
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.
Acting career
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.
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. 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!, as well as 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.
