Penélope Cruz, Jennifer Garner, and more celebs who started off as ballet dancers

As a child, Sarah Jessica Parker attended New York’s School of American Ballet in Manhattan. Being a student there is actually how she ended up first being cast in a Broadway play, which led to her career in acting.

Amy Adams always wanted to be a ballerina before she deciding to try out acting. Once she reached the age of eighteen, the American Hustle actress realized she is simply not good enough of a ballerina to pursue a career in dancing. Luckily, her successful acting career seems to prove she made the right choice.

Zoe Saldana first discovered her love of dance in the Dominican Republic. She ended up enrolling in the ECOS Espacio de Danza Academy where she studied all forms of dance, but describes ballet as her passion. Her dance training along with her acting experience helped her land her first film role, playing ballet student Eva Rodriguez in Center Stage.

Penelope Cruz was born and raised in Spain, where she studied classical ballet for nine years at Spain’s National Conservatory. When she was a teenager, she became interested in acting and in 1991, she made her debut in Jamón, Jamón. That film is also where she also met her future husband, Javier Bardem, for the very first time.

Charlize Theron didn’t always want to be an actress, but a knee injury force her to give up her dreams of being a ballerina. It was her mom who urged her to try out acting instead.

“I was a ballerina from the time I was four years old and I thought that‘s what I’d always do,” she said. “I left South Africa at 16 and studied abroad and supported myself by modeling. I ended up in New York and soon realized that my career was over and my knees had said goodbye to me and I’d never thought of a plan B.”

Jennifer Garner is an avid ballet fan and has been a supporter of the American Ballet Theater for a long time. The actress has also been known to incorporate the art form into her daily routine, taking part in a few ballet-related dance workouts over the years.

As a child, Naomi Campbell trained to be a ballerina, following in the footsteps of her mother. She spent her early years in Rome, where her mother worked as a modern dancer. From the age of three, Campbell attended the Barbara Speake Stage School and at 10 she was accepted into the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, where she studied ballet. But when the beauty was 15, she ended up being discovered by a modeling agency--and the time she was 16, she was on the cover of Elle.

After she graduated from high school, Natalie Portman studied ballet and modern dance at the American Theater Dance Workshop. That training ended up coming in handy in 2010, when she prepared for her role in Black Swan by training in ballet for five-eight hours a day for six months.

Before becoming a model and an actor, Anya Taylor-Joy used to dance ballet. She stopped pursuing dancing professionally when she was about fifteen years old, but the she has said that she still finds what she learned through dance to be useful in her acting career.

“I’m trying to get back into dance. I now haven’t exercised in like 5 years. I want to get back into it because it’s really good for the soul,” she said. “I love to dance. But mostly I’ll go to a salsa club and just dance with my girlfriends.”

Welsh singer and actress Annette McLaughlin revealed years ago that the only boy in her ballet class when she was seven years-old was none other than Christian Bale.

“Christian was the only boy in the class and all the girls were all in love with him. He was really cool,” she revealed. “He played the drums really well and being the only boy in the class he had a lot of attention.”