'My mom raised us on the motto 'Your happiness is your own responsibility,'" Jennifer Garner said. "So I've always felt that you have to work for it. You have to find it for yourself."
In 2000, happiness found Jenniefer Garner. She was unexpectedly cast as the glamorous secret agent Sydney Bristow in Alias, the critically praised action thriller now in its third season on ABC. She also married the man she deeply loved, actor Scott Foley, a star of the TV series Felicity. "I was excited that this was the life that had plopped into my lap," she said. "I couldn't believe my luck."
Alias made her a new star on television, won her a Golden Globe and opened the door to major movie roles. Her new film, 13 Going on 30, a highly anticipated comedy co-starring Mark Ruffalo, will be released this month.
"I never had a drive for stardom," said Garner, 31. "I wanted to act for a living, then go home, make dinner and be with the kids." But it didn't happen that way. Despite working hard to make both her career and her marriage succeed, she and Foley divorced last year.
I met with Jennifer Garner in Los Angeles, where she lives in the Pacific Palisades house she once shared with her husband. Although Garner has dated since the split -- notably Michael Vartan, 35, a fellow actor on Alias-she lives alone.
"Now I'm just by myself," she siad. "I'm trying to make the best life I can out of this crazy thing that's happened and create a dream for myself again."
Jennifer Garner's dream began in Charleston, W. Va., in the foothills of the Appalacian Mountains, where she was brought up. Both of her parents came from poverty and made successful lives. Her father, Bill Garner, 64, is a retired chemical engineer. Her mother, Pat, 65, is a former college professor.
"My parents started with nothing-just ambition and a work ethic," Garner said. "To me, they're everything that's good about America. They proudly pulled themselves up and then lifted us up."
Jeniffer, her older sister, Melissa, and younger sister, Sussanah, were held to strict rules: No nail polish, no pierced ears, no movies. "I sometimes joke that we were just a step away from being Amish," she said.
"My parents set standards because they wanted us to have what they didn't have," Garner explained. "They scrimpd and saved to pay for ballet and music lessons. They took us to London, where we saw plays-I loved the theater. They wanted us to know a bigger world."
In Charleston, Jennifer attended George Washington High and played alto sax in the band. "I was a geek," she admitted, "a bit on the outside of things. I wasn't particularly popular."
After graduating in 1990, she went on to Ohio's Denison University, where she got involved in theater. She spent summers working in stock theaters in small Midwestern towns. By the time she was a senior, she had decided to become a professional actress.
"I thought I could make a living in regional theater," Garner explained. "I wanted to live where I could do that and have a family."
But her plans changed after graduation in 1994, when she went to New York to visit some actor friends. A week after arriving, she was hired as an understudy in Turgenev's A Month in the County on Broadway.
She stayed in New York, auditioning for films and television while struggling to make ends meet. "I got really broke," she recalled, "spaghetti-and-butter-three-times-a-day broke." But she refused to give up. After landing a small role in a miniseries, work on Spin City and Law & Order followed. In 1997, she made her feature film debut in Washington Square.
After only two years in New York, Garner was supporting herself soley by acting, no easy trick.
Then a romantic relationship led her to Los Angeles. The relationship did not last, but Garner, then 26, again found work in TV. Although she was a virtual unknown, she landed two guest appearances on the hit WB teen drama Felicity. She was cast as the former lover of Noel, played by Scott Foley, one of the show's stars. "Felicity was huge turning point in my life," Garner said.
Foley began to romance her, sending flowers and cards. "Scott's a wonderful man," she told me. "We come from similar backgrounds, we have similar values. I was a working actor. He was a well-known one. People were telling him 'You shouldn't go near Jennifer. Your fans need to think you're single.' Scott said, 'No. I'm in love with her.'"
After living together for more than a year, the couple married. "It was complete bliss," she said. "Our ceremony was about how much we loved each other. It was beautiful. I hope to have a day like that again."
"Then why didn't your marriage work?" I asked. "Within three months of our marriage, I got Alias," she replied. "The first couple of years required so much attention, so much focus. I worked every day. It's almost impossible to balance things in your life when you're starting a new series.
"Every breakup is unexplicable. There are so many reasons why a marriage doesn't work." Her eyes filled with tears. "It's nothing but heartache." She took a few minutes to compose herself. "I'm OK now. I cry because talking about last year is so painful. It's been a hard time.
"But I feel like I'm going to grow up so much from it," she added, "like I'm heading in the right direction by myself. Maybe it takes painful things to make you evolve. It's not a bad thing, is it, to be strong in some ways and fragile and vulnerable in others?"
After a moment, she smiled and said, "I really believe in being with your partner through all the good and bad times in life. I think that will happen for me. But I'm going to be OK whatever happens. In the end, life is good."
