Jessica Alba: I was ‘so shy’ growing up

Jessica Alba was "so shy" growing up.

The ‘Sin City: A Dame To Kill For’ star admits she was very nervous around boys in her younger years and never had a boyfriend until she was 18.

She told Allure magazine: "I would tell my younger self you are smarter than you think you are. I always felt like because I didn’t go to college, I wasn’t smart. That’s not the case. I wouldn’t be so hard on myself about being accepted [by others].

"I cared so much about everyone liking me. If I could just spend a little less time thinking about what other people thought, I think that would’ve freed me up [to focus on myself]. I also thought a lot about boys even though I was so shy and never really had a boyfriend until I was 18. I would like to tell myself to be a little more brave or courageous if I liked someone."

Meanwhile, the 35-year-old actress – who has Honor, eight, and Haven, five, with Cash Warren – previously admitted she grew up thinking she was dumb because she didn’t go to university.

She shared: "I thought I was dumb because I didn’t go to college. I felt if you didn’t have a degree you’d never be respected or considered intelligent. Now I realise I’m perfectly capable of doing lots of things."

And Jessica also revealed she was once afraid of speaking up about being objectified in Hollywood.

She said: "Success in entertainment used to be purely financial for me. Once I was in my mid-20s and had achieved some degree of security, I started looking for something more substantive to focus on. Then when I got pregnant a few years later, I came up with the idea for my company.

"When I was young I didn’t know how to speak up [at work] and say, ‘I don’t like this.’ I wasn’t that person [a sex symbol] people were portraying me as. I come from a pretty conservative background; I was a tomboy wearing baggy clothes. But you’re being marketed in a movie to sell it – I understood it was the characters I was playing."