January Jones

January Jones was born January 5, 1978, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The eldest of three sisters, she attended Roosevelt High School where she balanced her studies with a part-time job at Dairy Queen. “I loved my after-school job at the Dairy Queen, though I’m sworn to secrecy about their recipes,” she says. “I’d whip up my own concoctions, like mixing ice cream with their slushy, which is now called a Misty Freeze. I did that before it was even on their menu.”

JANUARY JONES BEGINS MODELING
January Jones also found gainful employment as model and she eventually moved to New York City at the age of 18 to further her career. It proved to be a savvy decision, and before long she was appearing in high-profile ads for Abercrombie & Fitch and Clearasil. She also participated in a particularly precarious photo shoot in Paris that nearly ended her career. “I was in lingerie on a trampoline and had to jump into the air and do weird poses for eight hours,” she recalls. “The constant jumping made my legs start to buckle. And no one on the shoot spoke English, or at least they pretended they didn’t. I was so angry.”

JANUARY JONES IN FULL FRONTAL
The experience made her think twice about her choice of professions, and January Jones eventually transitioned into acting, making her big-screen debut in 1999 in All the Rage, an award-winning independent film starring Joan Allen, Jeff Daniels and Gary Sinise. A succession of small roles soon followed in The Glass House, starring Diane Lane, Bandits featuring Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton and the controversial Steven Soderbergh project, Full Frontal.

JANUARY JONES STARS IN AMERICAN WEDDING
January Jones truly came into her own in 2003 thanks to substantial roles in Anger Management, starring Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, Love Actually, featuring Liam Neeson and Emma Thompson and American Wedding in which she played Alyson Hannigan’s younger sister. “I feel as though my career really hit its high point when I was cast as a supporting actress in American Wedding,” she says. “I thought the script had a lot of depth and intelligence, and it really just jumped off the page.” January Jones especially enjoyed working with the film’s talented ensemble cast. “They were great to me. They were very supportive and helped me out,” she says. “They were just like brothers. And Alyson [Hannigan] was awesome to work with. She gave me everything I needed.”

JANUARY JONES STARS IN WE ARE MARSHALL
American Wedding helped secure her reputation as a star on the rise, and January Jones benefited with a pair of plum parts in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada alongside Tommy Lee Jones, and in the moving sports film We Are Marshall as the loyal wife of grief-stricken football coach Red Dawson. “The story was so good,” she says.

JANUARY JONES JOINS THE CAST OF MAD MEN, IS NO. 98 ON 2009 TOP 99
January Jones stepped away from the big screen in 2007 to join the cast of Mad Men, an original AMC series about one of New York’s most prestigious ad agencies. The program, in two seasons, won six Emmy Awards and a pair of Golden Globes. “It's a very fun series to shoot,” she says. “Never having done a series before, I was pleasantly surprised how similar to movies it was. I wasn't too rushed creatively and was a very safe environment to act in. I am blessed with amazing colleagues and beautiful writing.”