Alba was
born in
Pomona,
California to
Mark Alba, who is of Mexican descent, and
Cathy Jensen, who has Danish and French-Canadian ancestry; her father is dark and her mother has a
light complexion. Alba was raised in an
Air Force family,
along with her brother,
Joshua Alba, and her grandparents until
she was sixteen.
She grew up a
sports fanatic. Her father's Air Force career took the family to
Biloxi,
Mississippi, and
Del Rio,
Texas, before they settled back in California. Alba's
early life was marked by a multitude of physical maladies; she suffered collapsed lungs twice, had pneumonia 4-5 times a year, a
burst appendix, a cyst on her tonsils and asthma. This served to isolate her from other children at school because, as she claims, she was in
the hospital so often that no
one knew her well enough to befriend her. She also revealed on
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno that
she suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder as a child. Her health improved, however, when her family moved to
California.
Alba had expressed interest in acting since the age of five.
she took her first acting
class at age twelve, and an acting agent signed her nine months later.