Christina Hendricks rose to global fame as Joan in Mad Men, but the media only talked about her stunning physique instead of her work as an actress. Six years after the end of the series, she continues to work on television, and two years ago she divorced actor Geoffrey Arend.
At the age of 40, Christina Hendricks said goodbye to Joan and Mad Men, the biggest success of her career and the character with which most of the audience met her. Six years later, the actress has left behind the many insistent comments about her physique, she continues to work on television exploring new registers in thrillers or comedy, and for two years she has enjoyed being single.
Christina Hendriks was born on May 3, 1975, in Knoxville, Tennessee, the daughter of a psychologist and a forest agent. Because of her father's profession, the family moved from one city to another often, so her mother encouraged Christina and her older brother to attend drama school in Twin Falls, Idaho, as a way to friends.
Natural blonde, at the age of 10 Hendriks began to dye her hair imitating Ana of the green tiles. And after a new move to Fairfax, Virginia, Christina began to suffer bullying. As the actress told The Telegraph, she felt that she was an outcast and her high school classmates harassed her for being Gothic, her only refuge being the theater.
After finishing her studies, she signed up for the IMG modeling agency, moving to New York at the age of 18. She combined her work as a mannequin with some advertisements, and as she revealed, her hand is the one featured on the American Beauty poster.
At the end of the 90s, Hendricks jumped into acting and, after several years of episodic and secondary roles in series such as ER or Firefly, she signed for Mad Men (2007-2015). For seven seasons, the actress played Joan Holloway, the head of secretaries at the advertising agency where the series took place, set in the 1960s.
Although she received six Emmy Award nominations for best supporting actress, Hendricks complained on several occasions about the obsession of the media and much of the world with her imposing physique. In fact, according to a study prepared by an association of plastic surgeons in the United Kingdom published by The Daily Telegraph, the demand for br--st implants increased by 10% in 2010, among other reasons, due to the influence of her character.
Thus, Hendricks was praised for representing another model of a woman on television, but she felt that her performance was not valued. "I was working my a** off and people were just talking about my body," she told the Magazine. However, she recognized that until then her figure had been a problem rather than an asset.
"A couple of times the client said, 'We think she's a fantastic actress, but she's too old for this part,'" she recalled Hendricks of some casting calls. When I got over them, "usually they'd say, 'We've got to fix it, hide it, you've got a lot of chests. Can you wear that top another way?' But on Mad Men, it was, 'You look fantastic in that dress,'" she added.
