Milla Jovovich

""I am a strong Ukrainian girl, that is why I work a lot.""

American actress of Russian-Serbian-Ukrainian descent best known for firing machine guns and looking good while doing it.

Originally a supermodel, Milla Jovovich (pronounced me-la-yo-vo-witch) made waves in Hollywood with her roles as Michelle in Dazed and Confused and Leeloo (Multipass) Dallas in The Fifth Element. Today she is best known for playing Alice in the Resident Evil movies.

Like Helena Bonham Carter, she tends to collaborate a lot with her film director husband, Paul W. S. Anderson (though HBC has Milla beat by about 2 movies).

She maintains her modeling and fashion designing career, and even had her own clothing line, Jovovich-Hawk, but it went under in 2008. She's also a singer, and although her last official album was released 17 years ago, she continues to release demos and contribute to movie soundtracks.

This actress provides examples of:

 * Action Girl: She's been getting a lot of these roles since Resident Evil.
 * All of the Other Reindeer: Guilty of the crime of having a vaguely Commie-sounding name, which made her the butt of several jokes as a child.
 * Badass Family: Her grandfather was a military commander in Kosovo. In the course of his career, he uncovered a massive gold embezzlement scam. He refused to cooperate with the authorities in order to save a friend who was implicated in the crime. (Another version of the story is that he was the one who took the gold.) His refusal to testify briefly landed him in Goli otok, a maximum-security island prison.
 * Biker Babe: On-screen and off.
 * Blue Eyes: Paul W.S. Anderson found her eyes so striking that he added closeups of them to the first three Resident Evil movies.
 * Fag Hag: Prefers working with gay photographers, because she can show more leg.
 * Former Teen Rebel: In 1981, when Milla was five years old, her family moved out of Soviet Russia due to political reasons. The experience of being forced out of one's home, moving from place to place, and having divorced parents doing menial jobs helped shape Milla into a rebellious teen, engaging in drug use, shopping mall vandalism, and credit-card fraud. Luckily, this also happened to be the time she was doing modeling auditions.
 * Granola Girl: An advocate of the legalization of cannabis, and even appeared on the cover of High Times.
 * Genki Girl: Her twitter and her Resident Evil commentary with Michelle Rodriguez smack of this.
 * Girls with Guns
 * Jail Bait: Return to the Blue Lagoon. Oh, my my.
 * Before she turned 21, Jovovich had already graced the covers of over a hundred magazines, including Vogue and Cosmopolitan, and receiving titles like "Gianni Versace's favorite supermodel" and "Muicca Prada's muse."
 * Mother Ukraine Makes You Strong
 * Romance on the Set: Married director Paul W. S. Anderson after meeting him on the set of Resident Evil (having previously been in a relationship with Luc Besson, who worked with her on Joan of Arc and The Fifth Element).
 * Smoking Is Cool

Notable roles:

 * Lilli Hargrave in Return to the Blue Lagoon (1991)
 * Michelle Burroughs in Dazed and Confused (1993)
 * Leeloo in The Fifth Element (1997)
 * Joan of Arc in The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999)
 * Alice in the Resident Evil film series (2002-12)
 * Violet Song jat Shariff in Ultraviolet (2006)
 * Milady de Winter in The Three Musketeers 2011