The actress Jessica Harper is also an author of children's music and books. Harper was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Eleanor (née Emery), a writer, and Paul Church Harper, Jr., a painter and the former chairman of the Needham Harper Worldwide advertising agency in New York.Paul C. Harper died in 2013 at age 92. He is best known as a Mad Men-era agency executive who created a global agency, Needham, Harper & Steers, a predecessor to today's DDB Worldwide. He joined Needham, which would later become Needham Harper, as a copywriter in 1946. He moved up the ranks to become president of the agency in 1960. During his reign, the agency produced a series of praised campaigns in the '70s and '80s, including McDonald's "You deserve a break today,""The night belongs to Michelob" for Anheuser-Busch and "We make it simple" for Honda.
Jessica Harper attended the North Shore Country Day School and Sarah Lawrence College.
