Happy Birthday, Sarah Jessica Parker! 20 Vintage Snapshots From Her Career Before Sex and the City
Few stars in Hollywood can boast a career quite as long or fruitful as Sarah Jessica Parker’s. Today, the star is best known for her performance as the Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City, but Parker has been acting since she was a kid in the Midwest; her very first part was on the stage, appearing with four of her siblings in a St. Louis production of The Sound of Music.
But long before Parker was a mother of three, recognized internationally for series and films including The First Wives Club, The Family Stone, Glee, and Divorce, she was just a young aspiring actor going on auditions. (Take note, all you struggling thespians out there: Dreams really can come true!)
In honor of her 61st birthday today, take a look at Parker’s evolution from child star to New York–based glamour girl and producer.
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Parker and a young Brooke Shields (both of whom went on to—fun fact!—briefly be romantically linked to John F. Kennedy Jr.).
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Parker’s first big break came when she played the titular orphan in the musical Annie on Broadway.
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Parker, seen here in Los Angeles in 1980, has had a way with accessories from the very start.
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Parker’s hair has always been central to her image—just see her brass-colored curlicues as a rosy-cheeked 15-year-old.
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Even before Parker was Carrie Bradshaw, her sense of style was entirely her own.
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One of Parker’s first onscreen roles was Patty Greene on the CBS sitcom Square Pegs, which premiered in 1982.
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Decades before Parker and eventual Sex and the City costar Cynthia Nixon became the Carrie and Miranda we know and love, they co-starred together in the ABC TV movie My Body, My Child.
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1985
“I’d been shopping at thrift shops for a long time, just like on my own, because it was a necessity,” SJP explained of her vintage-heavy ’80s wardrobe in Vogue’s Life in Looks series. “You know, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper hadn’t surfaced, but I was wearing, like, big rayon dresses from the ’40s. Like, that’s just what I did.”
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1985
Parker in a vintage purple housedress with Kevin Bacon in the mid-’80s. The pair had starred together in Herbert Ross’s Footloose the year before. She initially turned down the offer to appear as sidekick Rusty after being asked to dye her hair red for the part. The producers eventually relented, and it would prove the 18-year-old’s breakout role.
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1985
Sarah Jessica regrets plucking her natural eyebrows in the ’80s—with Hollywood executives pressuring her to change various aspects of her appearance over the years. “There were some not-terribly-veiled conversations,” she reflected in Allure in 2008. “From as silly as plucking my eyebrows to getting my nose fixed. Nothing that stayed in my brain for very long.”
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1985
SJP training for the closing dance number in Girls Just Want to Have Fun, in which she costarred with Helen Hunt and Shannen Doherty. She trained as a ballerina as a child, citing New York City Ballet founder George Balanchine as one of her heroes. “I don’t really know how it happened, but from an early age a few of my siblings were working,” Parker reflected in British Vogue’s February 2001 issue. “Crews used to come through Cincinnati and audition kids. I don’t know why.”
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Parker, who's always had a strong sense of social conviction, is seen here attending a "Vote Yes on 65!" rally to support California's Proposition 65 to toughen restrictions on toxic discharges into drinking water.
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Parker starred as Kay Ericson Gardner in the 1987 NBC drama A Year in the Life.
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1987
Parker hardly took off this peace-sign necklace in the ’80s—her equivalent of Carrie’s gold nameplate. “If somebody asked me for my signature,” she recalled, “I always signed: Wage peace, love Sarah Jessica… I still have that necklace.”
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1988
“In the ’80s, I was wearing a lot of work boots and oversized men’s dinner jackets and floppy hats with flowers,” Parker recalled in Glamour in 2010. “I was making every mistake that was appropriate for the time. Eighty percent of pictures from that period deserve a cringe, but I don’t because I enjoyed it!” Here, she flops away at a party for Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis.
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Parker and Robert Downey Jr.—whom she dated from 1984 until 1991—at the 61st Annual Academy Awards in 1989.
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Even in black and white, Parker’s charisma shines through during a Tonight Show appearance in 1990.
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Parker, seen here in Beverly Hills in 1991, was rule breaking long before her Carrie days.
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Parker and her then beau, now husband Matthew Broderick at the 47th Annual Tony Awards in 1993.
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Parker has worked with many world-famous stars over the course of her career, but Elmo in 1997 may just take the cake.
