Jennifer Lien

Jennifer Lien
At the Generations II convention in 1996.
Born	Jennifer Anne Lien August 1974 (age 42) Palos Heights, Illinois, U.S.
Education	Professional Children's School
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1990-2002
Spouse(s)	Phil Hwang
Children	1

Jennifer Anne Lien (born August 1974) is an American former actress, best known for playing the alien Kes on the television series Star Trek: Voyager.

Jennifer Lien was born in Illinois, the youngest of three children, and joined the Illinois Theatre Center at the age of 13.

In a 1992 interview, Lien said: "My childhood was wild because I was very uncomfortable living where I lived (the South Side of Chicago). It was very industrial - if you didn’t fit in you got your ass kicked. I was just my own person, and I adopted this really tough skin because I had to if I wanted to survive. A lot of my friends were into drugs, and I saw a lot of them die." In a 1993 interview, Lien said:

When I was a little kid in Chicago, I always used to pretend I was somebody else. I wrote little plays, I was a tomboy, I hung out with the guys a lot. I never had much interest in hanging out with girls. I was always writing plays or watching movies or reading books, and when I was in seventh grade in junior high, I joined the drama club and found that I could fit right in, I could relax, I could do anything I wanted. I began to think I could make a difference, I could make people happy. I felt like I made the world just a little better for a while. Then, on the advice of an eighth grade teacher, I went to acting class, and then got an agent. I did industrial films and some theatre. Soon, casting directors started hiring me and then I got an interview with the people from AW. They liked me, asked me to come to New York, so here I am!

Lien's first television appearance was in a bubble gum commercial playing twins. Her first appearance on a television series was as a music academy student in a 1990 episode of Brewster Place, starring Oprah Winfrey. The same year she provided her voice for the dubbed English language version of Baby Blood, a French horror film. Lien moved to New York in 1991 after she was cast as Hannah Moore on the series Another World. She attended and graduated from the Professional Children's School while working on this series.

In a 1992 interview, Lien said: “A couple of years ago, I was trying to get an audition for a baseball movie, so I said that I could play baseball. We’d always played a lot while I was growing up, like in the backyard. But when I showed up at the audition, I was faced with these Goliath-like, testosterone women who could really play. I did survive the two days of training and auditions, but I basically pulled every muscle in my body!”