Milla Jovovich

• 1. Introduction

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  Milla Jovovich once invented and mastered an alien language of more than 400 words, all for a single film role. She is an American actress, singer and former model, born in Kyiv and raised in Los Angeles. In 2006 the music channel VH1 called her the "reigning queen of kick-butt." That title sits oddly beside the rest of her résumé, which includes runway shows, a debut album steeped in Ukrainian folk songs, and a fashion label of her own.

  How does a girl born in the Soviet Union end up on more than 100 magazine covers and at the head of a film series based on video games? What did she want from each of her careers? And why does a woman who left Russia as a small child still say her roots make her who she is?

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• 2. Soviet Childhood

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  Milica Bogdanovna Jovovich was born on the 17th of December 1975 in Kyiv, then the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Her mother, Galina Loginova, was a Russian actress. Her father, Bogdan Jovović, was a Serbian doctor originally from Montenegro. Most of her early childhood passed in Moscow, her mother's native city. Jovovich says she was born in Ukraine "pretty much by accident" and has no memories of those first years. Russia, she says, is different: she "remembers a lot" about it.

  In 1980 the family moved to London, then to Sacramento, California, and finally, seven months later, to Los Angeles. Galina and Bogdan divorced soon after they arrived. Galina tried to find acting work but met a wall of language barriers, and she ended up cleaning houses. Both parents also worked as cooks and housekeepers for the filmmaker Brian De Palma.

  Bogdan's story took a darker turn in 1994, when he received a 20-year sentence. He had been convicted of taking part in the largest health-insurance fraud ever investigated, and he was released in 1999. His daughter later said, "Prison was good for him. He's become a much better person. It gave him a chance to stop and think."

  At public school in Los Angeles, Jovovich became fluent in English in three months. Classmates were less welcoming. She recalls, "I was called a commie and a Russian spy. I was never accepted into the crowd." At the age of 12 she left the seventh grade to concentrate on modeling, which she had started at nine. She became a naturalized US citizen in 1994.

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• 3. Runway and Atelier

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  The cover of the Italian magazine Lei, shot by the photographer Herb Ritts in 1987, was the first big sign of where modeling would lead. Richard Avedon soon featured her in Revlon's "Most Unforgettable Women in the World" advertisements. Her early work with Ritts, Avedon and Peter Lindbergh brought advertising contracts to a very young model.

  Since then she has appeared on more than 100 magazine covers, among them Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar and GQ. She has walked for houses such as Versace, Fendi, Marc Jacobs and Miu Miu. Her campaign list runs from Chanel, Prada and Calvin Klein to Gap and H&M. Since 1998 she has served as an "international spokesmodel" for L'Oréal cosmetics. The novelist Bret Easton Ellis even gave her a minor cameo in his satire Glamorama.

  In 2002 she was said to be the designer Miuccia Prada's muse. By 2004 Forbes had named her the highest-paid model in the world, and its list of the richest supermodels put her on top with a reported $10.5 million. Two years later the Spanish clothing line Mango hired her as its spokesmodel. Jovovich herself has shrugged at all this, saying, "Modeling was never a priority." The money, she explains, lets her be selective about the creative decisions she makes.

  In 2003 she and fellow model Carmen Hawk launched a clothing line called Jovovich-Hawk. The pair opened a showroom in New York City's Greenwich Village on the 13th of September 2005. Pieces sold at Fred Segal in Los Angeles, at Harvey Nichols, and in over 50 stores around the world. Vogue praised the label for a "girl-about-town cult status most designers spend years trying to achieve."

  In November 2006 the Council of Fashion Designers of America and US Vogue named Jovovich-Hawk a finalist for their Fashion Fund Award. Doo-Ri Chung took the top prize. The label went on to sign a deal to design a diffusion collection for Target. It ended by mutual agreement in late 2008, because the founders were short of time. Jovovich put it bluntly: "I'm an artist. I'm not someone who can deal with shipping rates and taxes."

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• 4. Early Screen Years

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  In 1985 Galina enrolled her daughter in acting classes, having "raised her to be a movie star." As acting jobs picked up, Jovovich swapped regular school for a school for young actors. In 1988 she made her professional film debut as Samantha Delongpre in the romantic thriller Two Moon Junction. That same year she played Lily McLeod in the television film The Night Train to Kathmandu. Television guest roles followed, including Paradise in 1988, Married... with Children in 1989 and Parker Lewis Can't Lose in 1990.

  At 15 she won the lead in Return to the Blue Lagoon, released in 1991, opposite Brian Krause. Because of her age and her looks, critics compared her with Brooke Shields, another child model turned actress, who had starred in The Blue Lagoon in 1980. Like Shields, Jovovich appeared nude, and the role was controversial. It earned her a Young Artist Awards nomination for best young actress and a Golden Raspberry nomination for "Worst New Star."

  In 1992 she co-starred with Christian Slater in the comedy Kuffs. Later that year she played Mildred Harris in the Charlie Chaplin biographical film Chaplin. In 1993 she appeared in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused as Michelle Burroughs, the girlfriend of the character Pickford. Her then-boyfriend Shawn Andrews played Pickford. The film's promotions featured her strongly, so she was upset to find her part much reduced in the finished cut.

  Andrews and Jovovich had married in 1992, while filming. He was 21 and she was 16, and her mother annulled the marriage two months later. Discouraged by the Dazed and Confused experience, Jovovich stepped back from acting and moved to Europe. She would not take another role until 1997.

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• 5. Leeloo and Luc Besson

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  The Fifth Element opened the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, and it marked Jovovich's return to acting. Luc Besson wrote and directed the French science-fiction action film. Bruce Willis and Gary Oldman starred alongside her, and she played Leeloo, an alien who helps save the planet. To impress Besson she said she "worked like hell: no band practice, no clubs, no pot, nothing."

  The costume became famous. Known as the "ACE-bandage" costume, the body suit was designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier and made of medical bandages. The film grossed over $263 million worldwide, more than three times its $80 million budget. The critic James Berardinelli wrote, "Jovovich makes an impression, although her effectiveness has little to do with acting and less to do with dialogue." She was nominated for Favorite Female Newcomer at the Blockbuster Entertainment Awards and for Best Fight at the MTV Movie Awards.

  Merchandise tells its own story. The film inspired a video game, and a Leeloo action figure was planned but never released because of licensing problems. In a 2003 interview Jovovich said Leeloo was her favorite role.

  Jovovich and Besson married in 1997 in Las Vegas, and they went skydiving straight after the ceremony. They divorced in 1999. That year she took the title role in Besson's The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. She cut her hair short and wore armour through several long battle scenes. Reviews of her performance were generally good. The historical drama did moderately well, earning $66 million worldwide.

  In 1998 she had also appeared in Spike Lee's He Got Game, playing an abused prostitute named Dakota Burns opposite Denzel Washington and Ray Allen. Her next project, The Million Dollar Hotel in 2000, was directed by Wim Wenders. It was based on a concept story by Bono of U2 and Nicholas Klein, and Jeremy Davies and Mel Gibson co-starred.

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• 6. Alice Takes Over

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  On the 15th of March 2002, Resident Evil reached US cinemas. Based on the Capcom video game series, it cast Jovovich as Alice, a heroine fighting a legion of zombies created by the Umbrella Corporation. She accepted the part because she and her brother Marco had been fans of the games. She trained in karate, kickboxing and combat, and performed every stunt except one jump to a cement platform, which her management judged too dangerous.

  The film took $17 million in its opening weekend and eventually made $40 million domestically and $102 million worldwide. In 2004 came Resident Evil: Apocalypse. She trained three hours a day, after three months before filming of "gun training, martial arts, everything." Critics liked it even less than the first film, yet it ranked number one at the box office. Jovovich was unhappy with the reviews and with director Alexander Witt's effort. She described a balance: big action films handle the commercial side, while she acts in "independent little films that never come out" for her artistic side. "It's a good balance," she said.

  Ultraviolet arrived on the 3rd of March 2006. She played Violet Song jat Shariff, a role with heavily choreographed fight sequences. The film was not screened for critics, was panned when reviewed, and made only $31 million worldwide. Resident Evil: Extinction in 2007 earned an estimated $24 million on its opening weekend and topped that week's box office. The Fourth Kind in 2009 cast her as a psychologist in Alaska who uses hypnosis to uncover patients' memories of alien abduction. Critics largely panned it, but it made $47.71 million in cinemas worldwide.

  Filming for Stone began in May 2009 at the recently closed Southern Michigan Correctional Facility in Jackson, Michigan. Robert De Niro and Edward Norton co-starred, and Jovovich played the wife of a jailed arsonist. In 2011 she played Milady de Winter in The Three Musketeers. After a lackluster response she criticised Summit Entertainment for not promoting it properly as a "family film" in the United States. Summit answered, "She doesn't know what she's talking about and we don't know where she's coming from."

  Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, in 2016, was the sixth and last film of the series. Directed, like the fourth film, Afterlife, by her husband Paul W. S. Anderson, it earned over $312 million worldwide, the highest in the franchise. Time Out wrote that while the series had slackened, Jovovich had "only gotten better, seasoning her long-legged athleticism with a commanding stare." The franchise became the highest-grossing film series based on video games.

  She went on to play the Blood Queen, Vivienne Nimue, in the 2019 Hellboy reboot. In 2025 she took the role of Gray Alys in In the Lost Lands and also worked as its producer. She is co-founder and owner of the production company Creature Entertainment.

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• 7. Songs and Bands

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  A demo tape landed Jovovich a record deal in 1988, when SBK Records heard a recording she had made. In August 1990 she told an interviewer her coming album would be "a mix between Kate Bush, Sinéad O'Connor, This Mortal Coil, and the Cocteau Twins." SBK first presented it strictly as a pop album, and she protested. She insisted on using her own poetry for lyrics and on recording her own instrumental material. She had written the words and music at fifteen, apart from a cover of a Ukrainian folk song, "In a Glade."

  In April 1994, billed under her first name, she released The Divine Comedy. The title referenced Dante Alighieri's epic poem. She chose it after seeing a sketch for the cover by the Russian artist Alexis Steele, which she felt had "all the struggle that I'm singing about. It is the divine comedy." Critics were warm, and comparisons to Tori Amos and Kate Bush followed. John McAlley of Rolling Stone called the album "remarkable" and "strikingly mature and rich in invention."

  The single was "The Gentleman Who Fell (Before The Court)." Lisa Bonet directed the first video, starring Harry Dean Stanton, but Jovovich was unsatisfied and filmed another. The second video, a homage to Maya Deren, was directed by Kate Garner and Paul Archard and played on MTV. She toured the United States and Canada through most of 1994, opening for Toad the Wet Sprocket, The Philosopher Kings and Crash Test Dummies. She chose small, intimate venues and turned down a musical appearance on Saturday Night Live. The musician Chris Brenner, whom she met in 1993, co-wrote the album with her and coordinated the tour music.

  A follow-up, The People Tree Sessions, came in 1998. In May 1999 she and Brenner formed an experimental band called Plastic Has Memory, in which she wrote the songs, sang and played electric guitar. It sounded much heavier and darker than her first album. The band played about a dozen shows in Los Angeles and New York City for a potential Virgin Records release, and Mick Jagger attended one. It never released an album and had disbanded as of 2021.

  Since 2003 she has also worked with Maynard James Keenan, of Tool and A Perfect Circle, on his side project Puscifer. She contributed vocals to the track "REV 22:20", which appeared on various film soundtracks. On the 13th of February 2009 she performed "The Mission" at the first live Puscifer show, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her voice also appears on Deepak Chopra's album A Gift of Love II: Oceans of Ecstasy and on Legion of Boom by The Crystal Method.

  Film soundtracks have carried her songs too, among them Underworld, made with the producer Danny Lohner, a longtime Nine Inch Nails bass player. "The Gentlemen Who Fell" turned up on the soundtrack of The Rules of Attraction. In 2001 she joined many celebrities singing "We are Family" for the American Red Cross. On the 18th of May 2012 she released the single "Electric Sky" and presented it at the Life Ball. She now writes songs she calls "demos" and posts them for free download on her website, with permission for fans to remix them.

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• 8. Roots and Reputation

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  At the 2011 birthday celebration of Mikhail Gorbachev, Jovovich sang and gave a speech of thanks. She said that when her family left the Soviet Union in 1980 they were sure they would never see their relatives again, but they had been reunited. In a 2005 statement she credited her Russian mother and the "Russian classical theatre school," and said, "A Russian person wants to find the truth."

  Asked whether she still feels Russian, she answered, "Definitely. I still speak Russian. I speak it with my daughter. I read her Russian stories and poems." She speaks fluent English and Russian and some French and Serbian. She credits her mother with a childhood of reading rather than television, and she believes education and intellect are a huge part of beauty.

  Her public image grew from her action roles. MTV called her "Every Geek's Dream Girl." Rebecca Flint Marx of Allmovie wrote that, despite bad reviews, the Resident Evil films had turned Jovovich into an "A-list action star." Maxim named her No. 11 on its list of "Hottest Nerd Crushes." In 2019 she joined more than one hundred models in signing a petition to help protect Victoria's Secret models against sexual misconduct.

  Her home life centres on a family. She married Paul W. S. Anderson on the 22nd of August 2009. Their first daughter, Ever Anderson, was born on the 3rd of November 2007 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. A second daughter followed on the 1st of April 2015. Jovovich revealed in 2019 that she was pregnant with her third daughter, after a miscarriage two years earlier, and the girl was born on the 2nd of February 2020. The family lives in Los Angeles and New York City.

  Outside work, she practices yoga and meditates often. She is unaffiliated with any specific religion but considers herself a "spiritual person," and she enjoys playing guitar and writing poems and lyrics. She has also advocated legalizing cannabis and appeared on the cover of High Times.

  The Russian National Movie Awards named her Best Russian Actress of the Year in 2012. Two years later they named her Best Russian Actress of the Decade.

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