Milla Jovovich: The Life Story Behind the Action Heroine

She was five years old when her family left the Soviet Union with almost nothing, and she was nine when she was modelling in New York, and she was twenty-one when she played an alien who falls out of the sky in a film by Luc Besson, speaking a language that did not exist. Milla Jovovich’s life does not follow a straight line. It follows a series of jumps: from Kyiv to London to Sacramento, from a child model to a teenage actress to an action heroine, from a girl who spoke Russian at home and English at school to a woman who has acted in English, French and Russian, and who has built a career out of being an outsider who learned to fight. The outsider is the thread. She has played aliens, warriors, saints and monsters, and in every one of them there is a girl who arrived in America with nothing and who had to learn, fast, how to survive.

From Kyiv to Sacramento in Five Years

Milla Jovovich was born on 17 December 1975 in Kyiv, in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Her mother, Galina Loginova, was a Russian actress, and her father, Bogdan Jovovich, was a Serbian doctor. The family left the Soviet Union when Milla was five years old, first moving to London and then, in 1981, to Sacramento in California. They arrived in the United States with very little money, and Milla has said that her parents worked cleaning houses while she went to school, and that the family lived in a small apartment, in a new country, in a language she was still learning.

She grew up speaking Russian at home and English at school, and she has said that the move made her feel like an outsider from an early age. She was a Soviet child in an American classroom, a girl with a strange name and a strange accent, and the outsider feeling never quite left her. Her parents later separated, and Milla has spoken about the pressure of supporting her family from a very young age, about the feeling that she had to earn, because the family needed the money. That pressure shaped the career: she started working as a child, she kept working as a teenager, and she never stopped.

Kyiv, London, Sacramento: three cities in five years, three languages, three lives. The movement is the story, and it is the reason her acting has always had a particular quality: a woman who is not quite from anywhere, playing characters who are not quite from anywhere either. Leeloo is an alien. Alice is a woman who wakes up with no memory. Joan of Arc is a girl who hears voices. All of them are outsiders, and Jovovich plays them as if she knows what that feels like, because she does.

A Child Model at Nine

The modelling began at nine. Jovovich was photographed as a child model in Los Angeles, and by eleven she was appearing on magazine covers, a pre-teen in a business that treats children as adults. She has spoken about the strangeness of those years: being a child in a room full of adults, being told how to stand and how to look, being paid to be beautiful before she understood what beautiful meant. The modelling paid, and the family needed the money, and she kept doing it, through her early teens, while she went to school and while she started to act.

Her first film work came in the late 1980s: a television film, The Night Train to Kathmandu, in 1988, and then Return to the Blue Lagoon in 1991, in which she played Lilli, a young woman stranded on a tropical island with a young man, played by Brian Krause. The film was a sequel to the 1980 hit The Blue Lagoon, and it was criticised, and it made Jovovich known as a teenage actress, at fifteen, in a part that asked her to be beautiful and innocent at the same time. She followed it with a small part in Dazed and Confused in 1993, Richard Linklater’s film about the last day of school in Texas in 1976, as Michelle Burroughs, a part that was small and that showed she could work in an ensemble, in a film that is now regarded as a classic.

The modelling and the acting ran together through her teens, and so did the music. At eighteen she released an album, The Divine Comedy, in 1994, a collection of folk-influenced songs that she wrote herself, and that showed a different side of her: a singer-songwriter, not just a model or an actress. The album was praised by critics, and it did not sell, and Jovovich has said that the music was the thing she cared about most, and the thing the industry cared about least. She kept making music, in between the films, for years, because the music was hers, in a way that the modelling never was.

Leeloo and The Fifth Element

The Fifth Element arrived in 1997, and with it came Leeloo, the character that changed everything. Directed by Luc Besson, the film is set in the twenty-third century, and Jovovich plays Leeloo, a supreme being who falls to Earth in a taxi driven by Korben Dallas, played by Bruce Willis, and who must save the world from an ancient evil. Leeloo speaks a language that Besson invented for the film, the Divine Language, and Jovovich learned it, and spoke it, in a performance that is mostly physical: she runs, she fights, she hides, she learns to speak English one word at a time, and she does it with an orange-haired, wide-eyed innocence that made the character iconic.

She was twenty-one, and the film was a hit around the world, and it made her famous in a way that nothing before it had. She married Besson in 1997, and the marriage ended in 1999, after two years, and the divorce was public, and the film was the thing that lasted. Leeloo is still, nearly thirty years later, one of the most recognisable characters in science fiction: the orange hair, the white bandages, the language that no one else speaks. Jovovich played her as an outsider who learns to be human, and the performance works because Jovovich knew what it felt like to arrive in a new place and to learn a new language, one word at a time.

The Fifth Element also made her an action star, and the action star was the role that the industry wanted from her for the next twenty years. She could have fought it. She did not. She took the action roles, and she made them her own, and the action heroine became the career, even as she kept making music and kept working in fashion, in the background, for herself.

Joan of Arc and the Road to Resident Evil

In 1999 Besson cast her again, as Joan of Arc in The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, a film about the French saint who led an army at seventeen and was burned at the stake at nineteen. Jovovich played Joan as a girl who hears voices, who believes, and who is destroyed by the belief, and the performance was praised for its intensity. She was twenty-three, and she was playing a saint, a warrior, a girl who dies for her faith, and she played her with a fierceness that made the film work, even when the film itself was criticised.

The road to Resident Evil was shorter than it looks. In 2002 she was cast as Alice in Resident Evil, Paul W. S. Anderson’s film based on the video game, about a woman who wakes up in a secret laboratory with no memory, and who discovers that a virus has turned the staff into zombies. Alice is a fighter, a woman who learns to kill, who learns to survive, and who never stops moving, and Jovovich played her as a woman who is always one step ahead of the monsters, because she has to be. The film was a hit, and it spawned a franchise, and Alice became the role that defined the next fourteen years of her life.

Between The Fifth Element and Resident Evil she played in a run of films that showed the range: the 1998 film? She played in the 2000 film The Claim, a western directed by Michael Winterbottom, as Lucia, a woman in a gold-rush town, and in the 2001 film Zoolander, as Katinka, a villain’s henchwoman, in a comedy about male models. The parts were different, and they were played with the same commitment: a western heroine, a comedy villain, a saint, an alien. The range was there, and the industry saw it, and then Resident Evil arrived, and the range narrowed, because the franchise was too successful to leave.

Alice: Six Films, Fourteen Years

Resident Evil ran for six films, from 2002 to 2016, and Jovovich played Alice in all of them: Resident Evil in 2002, Resident Evil: Apocalypse in 2004, Resident Evil: Extinction in 2007, Resident Evil: Afterlife in 2010, Resident Evil: Retribution in 2012, and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter in 2016. The films made more than 1.2 billion dollars worldwide, and they made Jovovich one of the highest-paid action stars in the world, and they made Alice one of the most famous characters in video-game cinema.

Alice changes across the six films. In the first, she wakes up with no memory, in a laboratory, and she learns to fight. In the second, she is in a city overrun by zombies, and she learns to lead. In the third, she is in a desert, alone, and she learns to survive. In the fourth, she loses her powers, and she learns to fight without them. In the fifth, she is in a facility that simulates her life, and she learns that nothing is real. In the sixth, she goes back to the beginning, to the Hive, and she ends the story she started. Jovovich played all of it, over fourteen years, in the same character, growing older with her, and making Alice feel like a real woman, not just a video-game avatar.

The franchise also changed her life in another way: she married Paul W. S. Anderson, the director of the films, in 2009, and they have worked together ever since, on Resident Evil and on Monster Hunter, and on the life they built together. Anderson is the director who understood what Jovovich could do, and who built a franchise around her, and the partnership, on screen and off, is the centre of her career.

Music, Fashion, and a Life Beyond Action

The action films were the public career. The private career was music and fashion, and it ran alongside the films for the whole of her adult life. The Divine Comedy, released in 1994, was a folk album, written by Jovovich herself, and it was praised by critics for its honesty and its strangeness. She has released music since, in between the films, and she has performed live, in small venues, for audiences who know her as a singer, not as an action star. The music is hers, in a way that the films are not, and she has kept making it because it is the thing she cares about most.

In 2003 she co-founded a clothing line, Jovovich-Hawk, with the designer Carmen Hawk, a line of women’s clothes that was sold in shops in Los Angeles and New York, and that ran until 2008. The line was a success, and it showed a different side of her: a designer, not just a model, a woman who understands clothes from the inside, because she spent her childhood being dressed by other people. She has also worked as a model throughout her career, appearing on magazine covers and in campaigns, in a business she entered at nine and never quite left.

She speaks several languages: English, Russian, French, and Serbian, the language of her father’s family, and she has acted in English, French and Russian, in films made in different countries, for different audiences. The languages are part of the outsider story: a woman who grew up speaking Russian at home and English at school, who learned French in Paris, and who can work in any of them, without ever quite belonging to any of them.

Family, Monster Hunter, and What Comes Next

Jovovich is married to Paul W. S. Anderson, the director of Resident Evil, and they have three daughters: Ever, born in 2007, Dashiel, born in 2015, and Osian, born in 2020. She has spoken about motherhood, about the pressure of working while raising children, and about the decision to take roles that let her be at home. Ever, her eldest daughter, has followed her into acting, appearing in films as a child, and Jovovich has spoken about the strangeness of watching her daughter do the thing she did at the same age, in a different world.

In 2020 she played Artemis in Monster Hunter, Anderson’s film based on the video game, as a soldier who falls into a world of giant monsters, and who must learn to fight them with a hunter, played by Tony Jaa. The film was a return to the action genre that made her famous, and it showed that she could still carry a franchise, at forty-five, in a part that asked her to run, to fight, and to survive. She also played Nimue, the Blood Queen, in Hellboy in 2019, as a villain, a witch who wants to destroy the world, and Milady de Winter in The Three Musketeers in 2011, as a spy and an assassin, in a film directed by Anderson.

She is fifty, she has been working for more than forty years, since she was nine, and she has played an alien, a saint, a warrior, a witch, and a mother. The range is the story, and the outsider is the thread, and the thread is still there, in every part she plays, because the girl who arrived in Sacramento with nothing never quite left, and she never quite wanted to, and the woman she became is still fighting, still singing, still working, still refusing to be only one thing, and still proving that the outsider is the strongest person in the room, and the one worth watching most, in every film, in every language, in every life she lives on screen.

The Claim, Zoolander, and the In-Between Years

Between The Fifth Element and Resident Evil, there were films that showed a different Jovovich, and they are worth naming because they prove the range that the franchise later hid. In 2000 she played Lucia in The Claim, Michael Winterbottom’s western about a gold-rush town in California, as a woman who is bought and sold, and who fights for her freedom. The film was a western, a genre that Jovovich had never worked in, and she played Lucia with a stillness that made the character feel like a woman who has seen too much and who cannot look away.

In 2001 she played Katinka in Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s comedy about male models, as the henchwoman of a villain who wants to assassinate the Prime Minister of Malaysia. Katinka is a joke, a woman in a leather catsuit who speaks in a thick accent and who is completely serious about a ridiculous plan, and Jovovich played her with a commitment that made the joke work. The film was a hit, and it showed that she could do comedy, and that she could laugh at herself, in a way that the action films never asked her to.

The Claim and Zoolander, made in 2000 and 2001, are the last films before the franchise, and they show an actress who could play anything: a western heroine, a comedy villain, a saint, an alien. The range was there, and the industry saw it, and then Alice arrived, and the range narrowed, because the franchise was too successful to leave, and too successful to escape.

Hellboy, Monster Hunter, and the Villain Turn

The years after Resident Evil brought a different kind of part: the villain. In 2011 she played Milady de Winter in The Three Musketeers, directed by Anderson, as a spy and an assassin, a woman who works for the Cardinal and who betrays everyone she meets. Milady is elegant, dangerous, and completely without conscience, and Jovovich played her with a pleasure that made the character feel like a woman who enjoys being bad.

In 2019 she played Nimue, the Blood Queen, in Hellboy, as a witch who wants to destroy the world, a villain who is ancient, powerful, and angry, and who has been waiting for centuries to take her revenge. The film was not a hit, and it was criticised, but Jovovich’s performance was praised for its commitment, for the way she played Nimue as a woman who believes she is right, and who cannot understand why the world does not agree with her.

In 2020 she played Artemis in Monster Hunter, Anderson’s film based on the video game, as a soldier who falls into a world of giant monsters, and who must learn to fight them with a hunter, played by Tony Jaa. The film was a return to the action genre that made her famous, and it showed that she could still carry a franchise, at forty-five, in a part that asked her to run, to fight, and to survive. Three parts, three different kinds of strength: a spy, a witch, a soldier. The villain turn was not a departure. It was a return to the range that the franchise had hidden, and it showed that the range was still there, waiting to be used.

The Fashion Line: Jovovich-Hawk

The fashion work deserves its own space, because it shows a side of Jovovich that the films never show: a designer, not just a model, a woman who understands clothes from the inside. In 2003 she co-founded Jovovich-Hawk, a clothing line, with the designer Carmen Hawk, a line of women’s clothes that was sold in shops in Los Angeles and New York, and that ran until 2008. The line was a success, and it was praised for its style, and it showed that Jovovich, who had spent her childhood being dressed by other people, could dress other people herself, and could do it well.

The line ended in 2008, and Jovovich has spoken about the decision to close it, about the time it took, and about the choice to focus on the films and on her family. The fashion was a chapter, not the whole book, and the chapter closed, and the book went on, to Monster Hunter and to Hellboy and to motherhood, and the fashion stayed in the background, as a reminder that the girl who modelled at nine could also design at twenty-eight, and that the range was always there, waiting to be used, in clothes and in films and in music, in every language she speaks.

My Take:

The first thing I think about Milla Jovovich is the childhood, because it explains everything else. She was five when her family left the Soviet Union, and she was nine when she was modelling in New York, and she was supporting her family before she was a teenager. That is not a childhood. That is a job, and it is a job that teaches a child to work, to be professional, to show up and to deliver, before she understands what the job is. Jovovich learned that lesson early, and she has never unlearned it. She shows up, she does the work, and she does it for forty years, in a business that discards people after five.

The second thing is the outsider feeling, because it is the thread that runs through every part she has played. She grew up speaking Russian at home and English at school, a Soviet child in an American classroom, and she has said that the move made her feel like an outsider from an early age. Leeloo is an alien. Alice is a woman with no memory. Joan of Arc is a girl who hears voices. All of them are outsiders, and Jovovich plays them as if she knows what that feels like, because she does. The outsider is not a costume for her. It is a memory, and the memory makes the performance true.

Leeloo is the performance that will define her, and it deserves to be talked about as one of the great science-fiction performances of the 1990s. She was twenty-one, playing an alien who speaks a language that did not exist, who falls out of the sky and who must save the world, and she played her with an innocence that made the character iconic. The orange hair, the white bandages, the language — all of it could have been a joke, and Jovovich played it straight, with a physicality that made Leeloo feel like a real being, not a special effect. She runs, she fights, she hides, she learns to speak English one word at a time, and the audience believes her, because she believes it.

Alice is the role that made her rich, and it is worth saying what that means. Six films, fourteen years, more than 1.2 billion dollars, and a character who is one of the most famous in video-game cinema. Jovovich played Alice from 2002 to 2016, growing older with her, and making her feel like a real woman, not just an avatar. The films were not always good — some of them were messy, some of them were silly — but Jovovich was always good in them, always committed, always physical, always present. That commitment, across six films and fourteen years, is a rare thing, and it is the reason the franchise worked. The audience came back because Alice came back, and Alice came back because Jovovich did.

Joan of Arc is the performance that shows the range, and it is underrated. She was twenty-three, playing a saint, a warrior, a girl who hears voices and who is burned at the stake at nineteen, and she played her with a fierceness that made the film work, even when the film itself was criticised. Joan is not an action heroine. She is a believer, a girl who dies for her faith, and Jovovich plays the belief without ever making it sentimental. That is a hard performance to give, and it is one of the best of her career, because it shows that she can play a saint as convincingly as she can play a warrior.

The music deserves more attention than it gets. The Divine Comedy, released in 1994, when she was eighteen, is a folk album, written by Jovovich herself, and it was praised by critics for its honesty. She has said that the music was the thing she cared about most, and the thing the industry cared about least, and that is a familiar story for an actress who is known for her face: the thing you care about is not the thing they want from you. She kept making music anyway, in between the films, because the music was hers, and the films were not. That stubbornness, that refusal to give up the thing that matters, is one of the most admirable things about her, and it is the same stubbornness that made her a model at nine, an actress at fifteen, an action star at twenty-one, and a mother at thirty-one, and that keeps her working at fifty, in films and in music and in fashion, in every language she speaks.

The fashion line deserves a word too, because it shows the same stubbornness in a different form. Jovovich-Hawk, co-founded in 2003 with Carmen Hawk, was a clothing line, a business, a risk, and it ran for five years, and it was praised, and it closed, and Jovovich moved on, to the films and to her family, without regret. A woman who can start a fashion line, run it for five years, and close it when the time is right, is a woman who understands business, and who understands herself, and who does not need the business to define her. The fashion was a chapter, and the chapter closed, and the book went on, and the book is still being written, in films and in music, in English and in Russian and in French, by a woman who refuses to be only one thing.

There are weaknesses to name. The first is that the Resident Evil franchise, for all its success, narrowed her career. She became Alice, and Alice became her, and the industry stopped offering her the parts that did not involve fighting zombies. She played Joan of Arc, she played Leeloo, she played a western heroine in The Claim, but after 2002, the parts were mostly action, and the action parts were mostly Alice. That is the cost of a successful franchise: it pays, and it traps, and Jovovich has spent the years since the franchise ended trying to escape it, with mixed success.

The second weakness is that she has never had the kind of leading dramatic role that defines a career in the way that, say, a single great drama defines an actress’s reputation. She has carried a franchise, and she has carried a science-fiction classic, but she has not carried a film that rests entirely on her as a dramatic actress, without a costume or a monster. That is partly the business — Hollywood casts her as the action heroine, because she is so good at it — and partly a matter of choice, because the action parts are the ones that pay. I think she should take a plain, dramatic leading role, just once, to show that the range goes all the way. The talent is there. The opportunity has not been yet.

Her marriage to Paul W. S. Anderson is the partnership that defines her career, and it is worth talking about honestly. Anderson directed the Resident Evil films, and Monster Hunter, and The Three Musketeers, and he built a franchise around her, and the partnership, on screen and off, is the centre of her working life. That is a gift, and it is also a limit: when your husband is your director, the work is always close to home, and the home is always close to the work. Jovovich has made it work, for fifteen years, and the films they have made together are the ones that define her. Whether that is a strength or a limit depends on how you look at it, and I look at it as both.

Motherhood is the newest part of the story, and it is the part that may change the career most. She has three daughters, and her eldest, Ever, has followed her into acting, and Jovovich has spoken about the strangeness of watching her daughter do the thing she did at the same age. A woman who started working at nine, watching her daughter start working as a child, is a story in itself, and it is one that Jovovich has talked about with an honesty that is rare. She wants her daughters to have the childhood she did not have, and she is building that childhood, one film at a time, one choice at a time.

The Claim is the film that shows what Jovovich can do when the camera is close and the story is quiet. Lucia is a woman in a gold-rush town who is bought and sold, and who fights for her freedom, and Jovovich plays her with a stillness that makes the character feel like a woman who has seen too much and who cannot look away. The film was not a hit, and it is now regarded as a serious western, and Jovovich’s performance is one of the reasons it works: she plays Lucia as a real woman, not a symbol, and the audience believes her, because she believes it.

Zoolander is the film that shows she can laugh at herself. Katinka is a villain’s henchwoman, a woman in a leather catsuit who speaks in a thick accent and who is completely serious about a ridiculous plan, and Jovovich plays her with a commitment that makes the joke work. The film is a comedy about male models, and Katinka is the straight face in the middle of it, the woman who does not know she is funny, and who is funny because she does not know it. That is a hard kind of comedy to play, and Jovovich plays it without ever winking at the audience.

Milady de Winter, in The Three Musketeers, is the performance that shows the pleasure of being bad. Milady is a spy and an assassin, a woman who betrays everyone she meets, and Jovovich plays her with an elegance that makes the betrayal feel like a game. The film was not a hit, but the performance was praised, because Jovovich plays Milady as a woman who enjoys being bad, and who does not apologise for it. That enjoyment, that refusal to apologise, is the same quality that made Leeloo and Alice work: a woman who does what she does, and who does not explain herself.

Nimue, in Hellboy, is the performance that shows the weariness underneath the villainy. Nimue is a witch who wants to destroy the world, and who has been waiting for centuries to take her revenge, and Jovovich plays her as a woman who believes she is right, and who cannot understand why the world does not agree with her. The film was not a hit, and it was criticised, but Jovovich’s performance was praised for its commitment, for the way she played Nimue as a believer, not a monster. A villain who believes is more frightening than a villain who does not, and Jovovich understands that, because she has played believers all her life: Leeloo believes, Joan believes, Alice believes, and Nimue believes, and the belief is the whole performance, and it is the reason the audience keeps watching her, film after film, year after year, waiting to see what she will believe in next, and what she will fight for next, and who she will become next.

For a new viewer, I would suggest starting with The Fifth Element, because Leeloo is the performance that made her famous, and then watching Resident Evil, because Alice is the performance that made her rich, and then watching The Messenger, because Joan is the performance that shows the range. Those three performances, watched in that order, show the actor in the shortest possible time, and they show why directors keep calling her back.

The final judgement is this: Milla Jovovich is one of the most interesting actresses of her generation, not because she is the biggest star, but because she is the most durable. She started at nine, she is still working at fifty, and she has played an alien, a saint, a warrior, a witch, and a mother, and she has played each one as if it were the most important part she would ever get. The girl who arrived in Sacramento with nothing became the woman who carries a franchise, and the line between them is straight: a girl who refused to give up, and a woman who still refuses. That is a career worth knowing, and a life worth telling in full.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where was Milla Jovovich born?

She was born on 17 December 1975 in Kyiv, in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Her mother, Galina Loginova, was a Russian actress, and her father, Bogdan Jovovich, was a Serbian doctor. The family emigrated in 1981, first to London and then to Sacramento, California.

How old was Milla Jovovich when she started modelling?

She began modelling at nine years old in Los Angeles, and by eleven she was appearing on magazine covers. She has spoken about the pressure of supporting her family from a very young age, and about growing up speaking Russian at home and English at school.

Who did Milla Jovovich play in The Fifth Element?

She played Leeloo, a supreme being who falls to Earth and must save the world, in Luc Besson’s 1997 science-fiction film The Fifth Element, opposite Bruce Willis as Korben Dallas. Leeloo speaks a language invented for the film, the Divine Language, which Jovovich learned for the part.

How many Resident Evil films did Milla Jovovich make?

She played Alice in six Resident Evil films, from 2002 to 2016: Resident Evil, Apocalypse, Extinction, Afterlife, Retribution and The Final Chapter. The six films together made more than 1.2 billion dollars worldwide.

Did Milla Jovovich release music?

Yes. She released an album, The Divine Comedy, in 1994, when she was eighteen, a collection of folk-influenced songs she wrote herself. She has continued to make music between her film work, and she has said it is the creative work she cares about most.

Is Milla Jovovich married and does she have children?

She is married to Paul W. S. Anderson, the director of the Resident Evil films, and they have three daughters: Ever, born in 2007, Dashiel, born in 2015, and Osian, born in 2020. Her eldest daughter Ever has also begun acting.