'I'm not really a redhead,' says world's most famous redhead: Mad Men's Christina Hendricks reveals she dyed her natural blonde hair at 10-years-old



Seductive: Christina is now a fixture on the red carpet

She's the flame-haired temptress who lights up the screen in the hit American TV series Mad Men.



But actress Christina Hendricks has revealed she is really a natural blonde who became a redhead at the age of ten.

Christina, famed for her role as curvy Joan Holloway in the Sixties drama, dyed her hair because of her schoolgirl obsession with the story of Anne Of Green Gables.



In the classic children’s novel, the orphan heroine’s pigtails are a distinct red.



Christina, speaking ahead of the start of the fifth series of Mad Men, admitted: ‘I’m naturally a dark blonde. I couldn’t tell you what shade because I haven’t seen it in ages. I started playing with red hair when I was ten years old. I recognise how odd it is now, but my mum let me do it.



‘I was obsessed with Anne Of Green Gables. There was something about her that spoke to me – and I wanted to have her beautiful red hair. My mum said, “Well, let’s throw a rinse on it.”



‘My hair was very blonde at the time, but it went carrot red. And I was over the moon. I went to school the next day and felt like myself.’



Perhaps her mother might have thought to read the classic 1908 children’s book by Lucy Maud Montgomery, in which Anne Of Green Gables says: ‘You’d find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair. People who haven’t red hair don’t know what trouble is.’



It’s a line that might also equally apply to Christina and her seductive character in Mad Men.



Teenage Christina went on to dye her hair a series of rather more outlandish shades as she tried to express her youthful individuality.



‘In high school, I started experimenting with permanent colour,’ she said. ‘My mum nearly cried one day when I came down the stairs in jet-black hair.



‘I got purple, pink and black out of my system during those years. I was a goth kid. I dyed my hair about 42 different colours, shaved it at the back and wore black make-up.’

Her unusual looks and her friendship with ‘drama geeks’ meant Christina, now 36, was tormented by other students at high school in Fairfax, Virginia.



‘Kids can be pretty judgmental about people who are different,’ she said. ‘But instead of breaking down and conforming, I stood firm. That is probably why I was unhappy. There was a long corridor with lockers on either side and kids would sit on top of them and spit on you.



It was like something out of Lord Of The Flies.’

To dye for: Teenager Christina with hair colour out of a bottle at high school

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Christina moved at the age of three to Twin Falls, Idaho, where she found her love of acting, joining a youth theatre group.



‘My friends and I were all weird theatre people and everyone just hated us,’ she said.

At the age of 14 she moved again, to Fairfax, where she continued hanging out with her new school’s theatrical teenagers.



‘Moving as a teenager is never easy,’ she said. ‘So I tried to set myself apart and it ended up with multicoloured hair. It was how I was expressing myself.’



Pigtails: A model dressed as Anne of Green Gables

Her mother, psychologist Jackie Sue, surprisingly undermined her daughter’s self-esteem even further by telling her she looked ‘horrible and ugly’, the actress claims.



But Christina blossomed to become Esquire magazine’s Sexiest Woman Alive in 2010, and is now a fixture on the red carpet in Hollywood. Christina returned to being blonde only once – when MTV asked her to dye her hair for four episodes of its 1999 soap opera series Undressed.



Christina became a blonde and cut her hair to chin length for the show, quickly changing back to red when filming ended.



When she appeared in a Playboy magazine photoshoot that same year – intriguingly with visibly less cleavage filling her bikini than the ample bounty she sports today – Christina wore a short platinum-blonde wig.



Meanwhile, fellow Mad Men cast member Elisabeth Moss has spoken about playing career girl Peggy Olsen in the series, which returns to TV screens on March 27 – moving to Sky Atlantic from the BBC. Peggy rises from the typing pool to become a copywriter.



Elisabeth, 29, said: ‘I think she’s the truest feminist. It’s the feminism of, “Hey, I just want to do what I love, and I think I should get paid the same amount for doing it if I do as good a job as a man.”’

Christina appears in the fifth series of Mad Men



