Scarlett Johansson

Scarlett Johansson (/dʒoʊˈhænsən/ joh-HAN-sən; born November 22, 1984) is an American actress, model, and singer. She made her film debut in North (1994). In 1996, she was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead for her performance in Manny & Lo, garnering further acclaim and prominence with roles in The Horse Whisperer (1998) and Ghost World (2001). She shifted to adult roles with her performances in Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003), for which she won a BAFTA award for Best Actress in a

Leading Role; both films earned her Golden Globe Award nominations as well.

Roles in A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004) and Woody Allen's Match Point (2005) earned Johansson two more Golden Globe Award nominations. Her subsequent films included The Island (2005), The Black Dahlia (2006), The Prestige (2006), The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and He's Just Not That Into You (2009). She has portrayed the Marvel Comics character Black Widow / Natasha Romanoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; appearing in Iron Man 2 (2010), The Avengers (2012), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Johansson's roles in Don Jon (2013) and Under the Skin (2014) received critical acclaim and she won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play for her performance in the 2010 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. As a singer, Johansson has released two albums, Anywhere I Lay My Head and Break Up.

Johansson is considered one of Hollywood's modern sex symbols, and has frequently appeared in published lists of the sexiest women in the world, most notably when she was named the "Sexiest Woman Alive" by Esquire magazine in both 2006 and 2013 (the only woman to be chosen for the title twice), and the "Sexiest Celebrity" by Playboy magazine in 2007.

Born: November 22, 1984 (age 30), New York City, New York, United States

Height: 1.60 m

Spouse: Romain Dauriac (m. 2014), Ryan Reynolds (m. 2008–2011)

Upcoming movies: Captain America: Civil War, Hail, Caesar!, Ghost in the Shell

Children: Rose Dorothy Dauriac

Early life

Johansson was born in New York City. Her father, Karsten Johansson, is a Danish-born architect originally from Copenhagen, and her paternal grandfather, Ejner Johansson, was a screenwriter and director. Her mother, Melanie Sloan, a producer, comes from an Ashkenazi Jewish family from the Bronx; Sloan's ancestors were Jewish immigrants from both Poland and Minsk in the Russian Empire. She has an older sister, Vanessa, also an actress; an older brother, Adrian; a twin brother, Hunter (who appeared with her in the film Manny & Lo) and an older half-brother, Christian, from her father's first marriage.

Johansson grew up in a household with "little money", and with a mother who was a "film buff". She and her twin brother attended P.S. 41 in the upper-middle-class Greenwich Village neighborhood, in Manhattan, for elementary school. Johansson began her theatrical training by attending and graduating from Professional Children's School in Manhattan in 2002.

Early roles

Johansson began acting during childhood, after her mother started taking her to auditions. She would audition for commercials but took rejection so hard her mother began limiting her to film tryouts. She made her film debut at the age of 9, as John Ritter's daughter in the 1994 fantasy comedy, North. Following minor roles in the 1995 film Just Cause, as the daughter of Sean Connery and Kate Capshaw, and If Lucy Fell in 1996, she played the role of Amanda in Manny & Lo (1996). Her performance in Manny & Lo garnered a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Female,[6] and positive reviews, one noting, "[the film] grows on you, largely because of the charm of ... Scarlett Johansson", while San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle commentated on her "peaceful aura", and wrote, "If she can get through puberty with that aura undisturbed, she could become an important actress."

After appearing in minor roles in Fall and Home Alone 3 in 1997, Johansson garnered widely spread attention for her performance in the 1998 film The Horse Whisperer, directed by Robert Redford. She received a nomination for the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Most Promising Actress for the film. In 1999, she appeared in My Brother the Pig and in 2001 in the neo-noir Coen brothers film The Man Who Wasn't There. Also in 1999, she appeared in the music video for Mandy Moore's single, "Candy". Although the film was not a box office success, she received praise for her break-out role in Ghost World (2001). Credited with "sensitivity and talent [that] belie her age". In 2002, she appeared in Eight Legged Freaks with David Arquette.

Transition to adult roles

Johansson made the transition from teen roles to adult roles, with two roles in 2003. In the Sofia Coppola film Lost in Translation, she played Charlotte, a listless and lonely young wife, opposite Bill Murray. Roger Ebert wrote that he loved the film and described the performances of Johansson and Murray as "wonderful." Entertainment Weekly wrote of Johansson's "embracing, restful serenity," and the New York Times said, "At 18, the actress gets away with playing a 25-year-old woman by using her husky voice to test the level of acidity in the air ... Ms. Johansson is not nearly as accomplished a performer as Mr. Murray, but Ms. Coppola gets around this by using Charlotte's simplicity and curiosity as keys to her character." Johansson won the BAFTA Award and was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. She received nominations from a number of film critic organizations, including the Broadcast Film Critics Association, and the Chicago Film Critics Association

At age 18, Johansson played Griet in Peter Webber's Girl with a Pearl Earring. While noting, "Audiences feel as if they are spying on a moment of artistic inspiration when painter Vermeer creates the title work", USA Today praised her, suggesting, "[She] is having a banner year that Oscar voters should recognize." In his review for the New Yorker, Anthony Lane said, "What keeps Webber's movie alive is the tenseness of the setup ... and, above all, the presence of Johansson. She is often wordless and close to plain onscreen, but wait for the ardor with which she can summon a closeup and bloom under its gaze; this is her film, not Vermeer's, all the way." Owen Gleiberman, for Entertainment Weekly, wrote of her "nearly silent performance", observing, "The interplay on her face of fear, ignorance, curiosity, and sex is intensely dramatic." She was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama[38] and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She was nominated by the London Film Critics' Circle, the Phoenix Film Critics Society

Johansson was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in June 2004.The same year, she had voice or onscreen roles in five films: The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie; A Good Woman, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, which had a limited U.S. release, and was both a box office and critical failure, described by the The New York Times as a "misbegotten Hollywood-minded screen adaptation" with "an excruciating divide between the film's British actors (led by Tom Wilkinson and Stephen Campbell Moore), who are comfortable delivering Wilde's aphorisms ... and its American marquee names, Helen Hunt and Scarlett Johansson, [who have] little connection to the English language as spoken in the high Wildean style"; the critically panned teen heist film The Perfect Score, the romantic comedy In Good Company, a critical and box office success; and, finally, the dark, Southern drama, A Love Song for Bobby Long, for which she earned her a third Golden Globe for Best Actress nomination.