Jessica Paré
Jessica Paré
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Jessica Paré

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Jessica Paré

Jessica Paré (born December 5, 1980) is a Canadian actress and singer, known for her roles on the AMC series Mad Men and the CBS series SEAL Team. She has also appeared in the films Stardom (2000), Lost and Delirious (2001), Wicker Park (2004), Suck (2009), Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), and Brooklyn (2015).

Paré was born in Montreal, Quebec, the daughter of Anthony Paré, former chair of the education department at McGill University, and Louise Mercier, a conference interpreter. She grew up in the Montreal neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce with three brothers. She speaks English and French. Her family is of French Canadian and Irish descent.

Paré's father was an actor and drama teacher who toured with a theatre company, and her mother acted in amateur productions; her uncle Paul was a comedian with the sketch comedy troupe Radio Free Vestibule. Paré watched her father at rehearsals as a child and became interested in acting while helping him learn his lines for a production of The Tempest.

Her relatives include great-grandfather Al Paré and great-great-uncles Noah and Henry Timmins. 18th-century Irish dramatist, fiction writer, essayist and actress Elizabeth Griffith is also Paré's ancestor through her son, politician Richard Griffith.

Paré attended Villa Maria, a private Catholic high school in Montreal. She studied drama at TheatreWorks and appeared in over half a dozen amateur theatre productions as a teenager, including roles as Maid Marian in Robin Hood and Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Paré landed a small role in the television film Bonanno: A Godfather's Story (1999) during her final year in high school, which convinced her to pursue acting as a career. She also had small roles in an episode of the horror television series Big Wolf on Campus and the French film En Vacances (1999). She dropped out of the fine arts program at Montreal's Dawson College and pursued acting for two years. At one point, she worked as a photographer's assistant on automotive photo shoots.

After Paré auditioned for a bit part for the independent film Stardom (2000), director Denys Arcand chose her to star in the film. She played a naive ice hockey player propelled to international stardom as a supermodel. The comedic satire closed the 2000 Cannes Film Festival with mixed reviews from critics. Paré became the Canadian film industry's "it girl" following the film's release. She was also voted one of the 25 Most Beautiful People of 2012, by People Magazine.

Paré next starred in Lost and Delirious (2001), a story of two young lovers set in a girls' boarding school. The film debuted to mixed reviews at the Sundance Film Festival, but the performances of Paré and her co-stars Mischa Barton and Piper Perabo were widely praised. Paré appeared in the television miniseries Random Passage (2002), based on a series of award-winning novels by Bernice Morgan. Also that year, she appeared in the television miniseries Napoléon as the emperor's mistress and had a cameo appearance as a pop singer in Deepa Mehta's Bollywood/Hollywood (2002). The following year, she starred in the girl gang thriller film Posers (2003), after which she appeared in the CTV film The Death and Life of Nancy Eaton, in the title role of murdered heiress Nancy Eaton.

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