Sarah Jessica Parker

She is best known for her role as Carrie Bradshaw, a newspaper journalist, on the HBO television series Sex and the City, for which she won four Golden Globe Awards and two Emmy Awards.

Parker was born in Nelsonville, Ohio, the daughter of Barbara, a nursery school operator and teacher, and Steven Parker, an entrepreneur and journalist.

Parker's father, a native of Brooklyn, was Jewish, the original family surname being "Bar-Kahn" ("son of Kohen"); Parker has said of herself, "I always just considered myself a Jew".

Parker's parents divorced early on in Parker's life and her mother remarried Paul Forste.

Parker grew up with her mother, stepfather and seven siblings (three from her parents' marriage, and four from her mother's second marriage). As a young girl, she trained in singing and ballet, soon being cast in the Broadway production of The Innocents. Her family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and then to Dobbs Ferry, New York, near New York City, where Parker was developing her career as a child actress.

In 1977, the family moved to the newly opened planned community on Roosevelt Island, in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, and later to Manhattan proper; her parents later moved to Englewood, New Jersey where she attended Dwight Morrow High School.

Parker attended the School for Creative and Performing Arts, the School of American Ballet and the Professional Children's School, and later Dwight Morrow High School.

She and four siblings appeared in a revival of The Sound of Music, and Parker went on to the new 1977-81 Broadway musical Annie — first in the small role of "July," and then succeeding Andrea McArdle and Shelley Bruce in the lead role of the plucky Depression-era orphan, beginning March 6, 1979. Parker held the role for a year.

In 1982, Parker was cast as the co-lead of the CBS-TV sitcom Square Pegs.

The show lasted only one season before being canceled by the network, but Parker's performance, as a shy, misfit teen who showed hidden depths, was critically well-received.

In the three years that followed, she was cast in four films — the most significant of those being Footloose in 1984 and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, co-starring Helen Hunt, in 1985. Also that year, she became romantically involved with actor Robert Downey Jr., whom she met on the set of Firstborn and with whom she lived until 1991; during their relationship, Downey had a drug problem, and Parker has commented that she thought that she was "the person holding him together".

In 1986, Parker appeared in cult classic Flight of the Navigator, a Disney science fiction film about a boy, David, who is somehow transported in time eight years into the future without aging which turns out to have been done by an alien space craft.