Word: garner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...played by Jennifer Garner on ABC's buzziest new-season show, Alias, Bristow is one of the most winning female-action heroes on TV. Garner's ability to plausibly embody Bristow's many identities--cheerful graduate student, plucky double agent, vulnerable loner and (this part is key) killer clotheshorse--helped the actress become something else last week: a Golden Globe winner. Best-actress laurels don't normally go to ladies who lunge, as one could tell from the look on Garner's face when she accepted the award. What does one do after a surprise like that...
...were out of there so fast," says Garner, 29. "When we got to the party, people started coming up to me, and I felt, 'I just don't belong here.'" She and husband Scott Foley skipped out and were in their sweats, eating takeout pizza in front of the TV before the awards show had finished airing on the West Coast. "We felt like we had gotten away with something big," she giggles...
...like Felicity, also spawned by Alias creator J.J. Abrams, the new show features a heroine with romance-challenged friends, an unwanted crush and lots of doubt about a career-exit strategy. "She is very lonely," says Garner. "She's an overachiever who works to the best of her abilities but can't believe she is in a position of not wanting to be a spy anymore." The producers don't saddle her with a stint in special ops to try to explain her combat chops. She's an athletic collegiate who fights because sometimes...
Alias' refusal to make a strong woman seem like an estrogen-deprived freak gives an actress plenty to work with. And Garner delivers. Tall and slim, with flying buttresses for cheekbones and pincushion lips, she is saved from true, distracting beauty by her masculine jaw and long forehead. Garner can be vulgar when Bristow is threatened with anesthesia-free dentistry, vulnerable when she's dealing with her morose CIA handler and horrified when she discovers her fiance murdered in the bath. But mostly Garner spunkily goes about the business of gathering intelligence and trapping bad guys as if spies were...
...much more than people expected from an actress whose resume highlights were the nurse you didn't notice in Pearl Harbor and a character who didn't make it to the screen in Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry. No one seems to find the turnaround more risible than Garner herself. "It's like, let's just go quietly into the corner, absorb it and live with it for a while," she says. Thanking those who cast her in Alias during her Globes speech, she joked, "I know I was great in Dude, Where's My Car? but seriously...