With the iconic 1960s advertising series Mad Men winding down to its final episode, it seems entirely fitting that we pay tribute to one of the loveliest actresses to grace that or any other television series, the stunning Jessica Paré. With her lean and lithe body, huge green eyes gazing out from above high cheekbones and mischievous gap-toothed smile, Ms. Paré is at once a classic beauty and a unique one.
A native of Montreal, Quebec, the 33-year-old ingénue was raised bilingual in French and English and caught the acting bug as a child helping her father, a drama teacher and actor, rehearsing his lines. She quickly found success in Canada with 2000’s satire about beauty and fame, Stardom, opposite Dan Ackroyd. This led to more featured roles in 2001’s adolescent lesbian love story, Lost and Delirious, and her Hollywood debut in 2004 as Josh Hartnett’s jilted fiancé in Wicker Park.
After keeping busy if not quite breaking through in subsequent years with good parts in the TV series Jack and Bobby, the vampire comedy Suck and memorably topless in Hot Tub Time Machine, Jessica made a massive impact when she debuted as Megan Calvet in 2010’s Season 4 of Mad Men. Looking stunning in mod costume, Jessica imbued her fellow French Canadian character with coltish naiveté balanced by observant ambition. In short, Megan Calvet was a revelation and it’s no wonder Don Draper proposed to her after she was so good with his kids in Disneyland despite it shattering the lovely and intelligent market researcher Faye Miller’s heart (played by the lovely and intelligent Cara Buono). And in a case of life seeming to imitate art, or at least art imitating itself, it seemed as if the show ditched January Jones in subsequent seasons almost as completely as Don ditched the former wife, Betty, that she played to such early fame.
With Megan separated from Don in Hollywood and the entire cast of characters facing an uncertain future at the dawn of the 70s, Jessica Paré has done her finest, most emotionally challenging work to date this season. We’re not sure where she’ll pop up next but we’re fairly certain that even bigger things are on the horizon for this brunette beauty. We’ll certainly be watching the final Mad Men episodes with interest and hoping that certain Charles Manson/Sharon Tate-related rumors about her character’s fate are not true. And if we were lucky enough to be Megan’s chosen mate, we’d probably give up New York for the sunny L.A. climate and that beguiling, uncorrected smile. Heck, we might even give up advertising entirely. It’s not that hard with such a sweet incentive.
