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Jaime King (born April 23, 1979) is
an American film actress and model. In her modeling career and early film
roles, she went by the names Jamie King and James King, which was a
childhood nickname given to King by her parents, because her agency
already represented another Jaime — the older, then-more famous model
Jaime Rishar. King, because of the latter name, is sometimes referred to
as the "Model with a man's name".
Called by Complex magazine "one of the original model-turned-actresses",
King appeared in Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Harper's Bazaar, among other
fashion magazines. Afterwards, she began taking small film roles. Her
first larger role was in Pearl Harbor (2001). Her first starring movie
role was in Bulletproof Monk (2003). She has gone on to appear as a lead
in various other films, gaining more note after Sin City (2005), a role
which she will perform in its sequel Sin City 2 (2010).
King was born in the suburbs of Omaha, Nebraska, the daughter of Nancy
King, a beauty queen, and Robert King. She has a younger brother, Rob, and
two older sisters, Sandi and Barry. King was named after Lindsay Wagner's
character, Jaime Sommers, of the 1970s television series The Bionic Woman.
King's parents separated in 1994. King had attended the modeling school
Nancy Bounds's Studios and later dropped out of Westside High School in
1995 to pursue a modeling career in New York, afterwards enrolling in a
home-study program run by the University of Nebraska.
She was discovered in November 1993, at the age of fourteen, while
attending Nancy Bounds' Studios, a school for modeling. After being
spotted at her graduation fashion show by New York model agent Michael
Flutie, King was invited to New York to begin modeling professionally. She
joined with Company Management, who already represented Jaime Rishar, a
more established model at the time. To avoid confusion, King opted to go
by her childhood nickname, James, for the duration of her modeling career
and later, the beginning of her film career. In March 1994 she traveled to
New York for test pictures and received enthusiastic responses, however,
she did not return to New York until July 1994, after gaining a successful
advertisement for Abercrombie & Fitch. Much of fall and spring 1994 were
spent commuting between Omaha and New York.
King had a successful early career as a fashion model, and by age fifteen
she had been featured in the fashion magazines Vogue, Mademoiselle,
Allure, and Seventeen. At sixteen, King had graced the pages of Glamour
and Harper's Bazaar. She was featured in the cover story of the New York
Times Magazine published on February 4, 1996 and had walked the runway for
Chanel and Christian Dior. In 1998, she began co-hosting MTV's fashion
series, House of Style, with fellow model turned actress Rebecca Romijn.
Despite her success, King noted that she "remember[s] the times where I
was so alone" and thought she was "never gonna be able to be a kid."
In 2004, King, along with Halle Berry, Julianne Moore, and Eva Mendes were
chosen as spokesmodels for a high profile ad campaign for Revlon. The
advertisements were featured in print, television, theatrical, outdoor and
Internet venues, banking on their spokeswomen's "collective star power" to
sell the cosmetics products. In 2006, King was chosen by Rocawear CEO
Jay-Z to become the new face of the line; her advertisements were featured
for the winter 2006 season.
In 1999, King began her acting career and made her debut in the Daniel
Waters' comedy Happy Campers, as Pixel. Happy Campers was screened at the
Sundance Film Festival in 2001, and in 2003, King was nominated for "Best
Actress" at the DVD Exclusive Awards for her portrayal of Pixel. Filmed in
1999, she also appeared in Filter's music video for "Take a Picture".
Following her debut acting roles, King appeared briefly in the film Blow,
portraying the adult Kristina Jung, daughter of cocaine smuggler George
Jung (portrayed by Johnny Depp).
King made her first appearance in a large Hollywood production with her
role as the seventeen year old nurse, Betty, in the World War II epic
romance Pearl Harbor (2001). Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine had
commented that King "has a lively minute or two" in the film, but her part
was small and the "young cast is mostly pinup packaging". King went on to
be featured in the Incubus music video "Wish You Were Here". The roles
King took part in during 2001 garnered her the "New Stylemaker" title at
the Young Hollywood Awards.
In 2002, she appeared in the teen comedy Slackers as Angela Patton, Four
Faces of God as Sam, and the crime comedy Lone Star State of Mind as Baby.
Slackers received negative responses from critics, including one who found
that the characters "are not so strikingly original as to elevate the
slack material", while Four Faces of God and Lone Star State of Mind did
not have wide theatrical releases. 2003 saw King in the film Bulletproof
Monk, alongside Chow Yun-Fat and Seann William Scott, an adaptation of a
comic book by Michael Avon Oeming. She auditioned five times, did a screen
test and a physical test in order to obtain the role of Jade, a character
skilled in martial arts. This was King's first leading action film role,
however, Bulletproof Monk had received mostly negative reviews from
critics, who cited that the fight scenes were not as well choreographed or
directed as those other genre films, and that the alternating comedic and
action scenes were jarring. Despite those negative reviews, Bulletproof
Monk was nominated for "Choice Movie in a Drama/Action Adventure" award at
the Teen Choice Awards. Late 2003 saw King in the music video for the
Robbie Williams song, "Sexed Up", and on the cover artwork for the
single's release. In 2004, King appeared in the comedy White Chicks,
playing Heather Vandergeld, with actress Brittany Daniel as her sister
Megan Vandergeld, a parody on socialites Paris and Nicky Hilton. White
Chicks was also negatively reviewed by critics, receiving five nominations
at the Razzie Awards in the categories for "Worst Actress", "Worst
Director", "Worst Picture", "Worst Screen Couple" and "Worst Screenplay".
Despite the multiple Razzie Awards nominations, White Chicks received
"Outstanding Directing for a Box Office Movie" and "Outstanding Writing
for a Box Office Movie" at the BET Comedy Awards.
In 2005, King appeared in a variety of film and television roles. She
first appeared in the independent black comedy and satire Pretty
Persuasion, playing a small role as Kathy Joyce, the step mother of Evan
Rachel Wood's character. Afterwards, she gained lead roles in the film
adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel Sin City. She had met with
director Robert Rodriguez, who was a fan of her work, and at the time King
was unaware that Rodriguez wanted her involved in the film. Eventually,
"we started reading [the Sin City graphic novel], and it was really fun".
King portrayed Goldie and Wendy, the twin prostitutes in charge of the
girls of Old Town, in the segment The Hard Goodbye opposite Mickey Rourke.
Sin City featured a large ensemble cast of well-known actors which
included Rosario Dawson and Jessica Alba, with whom King had "kinda grew
up together" in New York. Sin City had opened to wide critical and
commercial success, gathering particular recognition for the film's unique
coloring process, which rendered most of the film in black and white but
retained coloring for select objects; King was one of the few in the black
and white film to have color, that being, red lips and blonde hair when
acting as Goldie. The film was screened at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival
in-competition and won the Technical Grand Prize for the film's "visual
shaping." The family comedy Cheaper by the Dozen 2 featured King as Anne
Murtaugh in yet another large ensemble cast, and the Al Pacino drama Two
for the Money as Alexandria; both films had negative critical and box
office reception. In television, she had a one episode guest appearance on
the teen drama The O.C. and a recurring role on the short-lived situation
comedy Kitchen Confidential. King was featured in the Zach Braff-directed
music video for Gavin Degraw's "Chariot".
In 2006, King appeared with a small role as Heather in the comedy The
Alibi, and a starring role in the thriller True True Lie. Her largest role
that year was in the David Arquette horror film The Tripper as Samantha;
Arquette had, in addition to directing the film, had produced, written,
and acted in it. King had a recurring role on the short lived comedy The
Class, which ended its run on television after an announcement in May
2007. The Class had been nominated for an Emmy in 2007, and won the
People's Choice Award for "Favorite New TV Comedy".
In 2007, King filmed They Wait, a horror-thriller film inspired by true
events, with Terry Chen as her husband and Regan Oey as their son. She
stars as a mother attempting to find the truth and save her son when
threatened by spirits during the Chinese tradition of Ghost Month. It was
featured in the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, but has not yet had a wide
theatrical release. In 2008, King appeared in The Spirit, a live-action
film adaptation based on the 1940s newspaper strip created by Will Eisner,
in which King portrays Lorelei Rox. The role reunited King with Sin City
writer Frank Miller, who wrote and directed the film.
Currently, King has four films in production that have release dates
estimated for 2009. The first of three to be released in 2009 may be the
Star Wars-themed comedy Fanboys. Its release date was pushed first to
January 2008 when director Kyle Newman received additional funding to
shoot new scenes, but the busy schedule of the actors postponed filming.
Still delayed, the filmmakers and its distributor, the Weinstein Company,
are involved in a dispute over which version to release. In May 2008, King
featured in another Newman-directed film, Act I of The Cube, the beginning
of an online movie-making contest.
The Pardon, a film based on the true life story of Toni Jo Henry, the only
woman to be electrocuted by the State of Louisiana, stars King in the lead
role. The Jim Kouf comedy, A Fork in the Road, has King portraying April
Rogers, alongside Daniel Roebuck. King will reprise her role as twins
Goldie and Wendy in the part sequel and part prequel of the Miller written
and co-directed film Sin City 2.
She plays Beth in Darren Lynn Bousmans remake of Mother's Day and narrated
the movie on Scream Award 2009. King stars in the documentary Scream
Queens 2, directed by Biagio Messina.
During her modeling period, King started using heroin; she entered drug
addiction rehabilitation at age 19 for her addictions to both heroin and
alcohol, and that enabled her to regain sobriety. In 2006, she commented
that her past reputation as a "party girl" is "like another lifetime" and
she now thinks of herself as a different person.
In January 2005, while working on the set of Fanboys, she met husband Kyle
Newman, the film's director. Within three months of dating, the two moved
in together. Newman proposed in Spring 2007, and the two married on
November 23, 2007 in an "intimate and relaxed" ceremony in Los Angeles at
Greystone Park and Manor, where Newman had proposed. King told InStyle
magazine, "I want at least three children."
King enjoys surfing and is friends with numerous musicians. In an
interview published in 1996, King, after retiring from modeling, announced
her plans to be a writer or a photographer. She presently lives in Los
Angeles. |
