She began her acting career at age 13 in Camp Nowhere , followed up by The Secret World of Alex Mack , and rose to prominence at age 19 as the lead actress of the television series Dark Angel β , for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. Her big screen breakthrough came in Honey From to , Alba starred in the Spectrum action crime series L.
In , Alba co-founded The Honest Company , a consumer goods company that sells baby, personal and household products. Her mother has Danish, Welsh, German, English and French ancestry, while her paternal grandparents, who were born in California, were children of Mexican immigrants. Her third cousin, once removed, is writer Gustavo Arellano. Alba's early life was marked by a multitude of physical maladies. During childhood, she suffered from pneumonia four to five times a year and had partially collapsed lungs twice as well as a ruptured appendix and tonsillar cyst.
She has also had asthma since she was a child. Alba expressed an interest in acting from age five. In , the eleven year old Alba persuaded her mother to take her to an acting competition in Beverly Hills , where the grand prize was free acting classes.
She won the grand prize, and took her first acting lessons. An agent signed her nine months later. She was originally hired for two weeks but her role turned into a two-month job when one of the prominent actresses dropped out. Alba appeared in two national television commercials for Nintendo and J. Penney as a child. She was later featured in several independent films. She branched out into television in with a recurring role as the vain Jessica in three episodes of the Nickelodeon comedy series The Secret World of Alex Mack.
Her big break came when James Cameron picked Alba from over candidates for the role of the genetically engineered super-soldier Max Guevara on the FOX sci-fi television series Dark Angel. Writing for the University of Melbourne , Bronwen Auty considered Max "the archetypal modern feminist heroβa young woman empowered to use her body actively to achieve goals", citing Max's refusal to use firearms and instead using martial arts and knowledge as weapons.
