One of four children, Jessica was born to parents of Finnish and Polish stock. Her father, Al, was a traveling salesman and her mother Dorothy was a homemaker. Never in one spot long enough to call a permanent home Jessica and her siblings (Ann, Jane and George) lived a gypsy life.
Aspiring to become a painter she enrolled at the University of Minnesota in 1976 and subsequently dropped out after she fell in love with an avant-garde photographer and filmmaker Paco Grande.
Captivated by the 24-year-old Spaniard photographer, Paco Grande, she traveled to Paris and lived out of a van discovering Europe through the photographer’s eyes. By July of 1970 they married and she abandoned her art.
Jessica had little interest in acting but loved the glamour of Hollywood -- her favorite movie being, Gone With The Wind. Not defined in a career she had thought of dancing but was taken by a simple mime performance by Jean-Louis Berrault and decided that she wanted to become a mime. In 1971 she began studying under the direction of Etienne Decroux in Paris for the next two years.
By 1973 she had returned to the States where Grande persued independent films in Jamaica. Jessica struggled to attend acting classes and to pay the rent. She was a waitress in Greenwich Village at the Lion's Head Tavern and took up modeling.
Her first and only marriage was ending and her acting classes were paying off. In 1975 producer Dino DeLaurentis was beginning a remake of the 1930's beast King Kong. At first Jessica was not DeLaurentis's pick for a leading lady, but with braces removed and an impacting screen test she won him over.
The movie was a monumental task where her mime techniques came into play reacting to a blank screen or the inanimate object. The movie King Kong (1975) co-staring with Jeff Bridges was her chance at the silver screen and it almost broke her film career. With a seven-year contract with DeLaurentis, she stagnated with no movies for two years and met another love, Mikhail Baryshnikov.
The defected U.S.S.R ballet national treasure was taking New York by storm. She had not even seen him perform when love took her heart. Her divorce became final and romance began again yielding her first child, Alexandra (1981).
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