UPDATED WITH CORRECT LOCATION!
My Name is Earl and I Love You, Man's Jaime Pressly returns home Wednesday to sign books at the South Coast Plaza Barnes N Noble Borders Books. Well, at least the North Carolina-born actress attended Costa Mesa High School while living with her classical dance instructor mother, who had moved to Southern California while in the process of divorcing Pressly's used car salesman and laundry king father.
By 14, Jamie had already become a spokesperson for her modeling agency, International Cover Model Search, and had gained recognition modeling in the U.S., Italy and Japan. A year later, she became legally emancipated from her parents and began her showbiz career as Drew Barrymore's body double in Poison Ivy. Pressly starred in the 1997 sequel Poison Ivy: The New Seduction. A year later she had the recurring role of assassin Mika in the TV action series Mortal Kombat: Conquest, and was cast in 1999 as the promiscuous dancer Audrey in TV's Jack and Jill. She's also starred in the films Poor White Trash, Not Another Teen Movie and Torque.
Pressly has found huge success as Joy Farrah Darville Hickey Turner on NBC's silly My Name is Earl, for which she was nominated for an Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series Emmy in 2006 and 2007, winning the latter year. She currently appears in the comedy I Love You, Man, which debuted at No. 1 at the box office. One of funniest things I ever heard was Pressly on Howard Stern's terrestrial radio show years ago, before Earl, telling the host he looked like he'd been “hit with a yarmulke.”
She'll be in town 6 p.m. Wednesday to promote her new memoir, It's Not Necessarily Not the Truth: Dreaming Bigger Than the Town You're From. She originally grew up in Kinston, North Carolina. Last year, Pressly was at the same mall promoting J'aime, her lingerie, full sleepwear and ready-to-wear line.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.