Amy Adams

• 1. Introduction

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  Amy Adams finished work on a Steven Spielberg film in 2002 and then went a full year without a job. Careers that stall that early rarely end up looking like hers. Adams was born on the 20th of August 1974. She has since won two Golden Globe Awards. She has earned six Academy Award nominations, seven British Academy Film Award nominations and two Primetime Emmy nominations. Annual rankings of the world's highest-paid actresses have featured her three times. Her working life began in dinner theaters, far from any of that. How does a dancer with no college education reach that point? What did the road from regional stages to awards season ask of her? And what does she do to prepare for roles that, by her own account, she struggles to leave behind?

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• 2. Army Brat in Colorado

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  Aviano, in the Friuli region of Italy, is where Amy Adams was born, because her father, Richard, was serving in the U.S. Army at the local air base. Her parents, Kathryn and Richard, were both American. She was the middle child of seven, with four brothers and two sisters. The family moved from one army base to another until she was eight. Then they settled in Castle Rock, Colorado.

  After leaving the Army, her father sang professionally in nightclubs and restaurants. Adams counts watching his shows, and sipping Shirley Temples at the bar, among her fondest memories. Money was tight. The family camped, hiked and staged amateur skits written by her father or sometimes her mother. Adams loved the plays and always took the lead.

  In 1985 her parents divorced and left the Mormon church, which she had grown up in. She says she values that upbringing for teaching her love and compassion. Her father moved to Arizona and remarried. The children stayed with their mother, who became a semi-professional bodybuilder and brought them along to the gym. Adams has likened her unsupervised early years with her siblings to Lord of the Flies. She calls herself a "scrappy, tough kid" who fought often with other children.

  At Douglas County High School in Castle Rock, Adams was not academically inclined. She sang in the choir, competed in track and gymnastics, and trained as an apprentice at the David Taylor Dance Company, hoping to become a ballerina. She disliked school and mostly kept to herself. After graduation she moved to Atlanta with her mother and skipped college, which disappointed her parents and which she later regretted. At 18 she decided she was not gifted enough for professional ballet. Musical theater suited her better, and one of her first stage parts was a volunteer role in a community production of Annie. To pay the bills she worked as a greeter at a GAP store and then waited tables at Hooters, quitting once she had saved enough for a used car. Her next jobs would also involve carrying plates, but with a stage attached.

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• 3. Dinner Theater to Hollywood

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  A 1994 dinner theater production of A Chorus Line in Boulder, Colorado, gave Adams her first professional job. The role required her to wait on tables before climbing onto the stage to perform. She enjoyed the singing and dancing but disliked the serving. She also lost the job after a fellow dancer, whom she thought was a friend, made false accusations to the director. In her words, "I never really knew what the lies were. I only knew I kept getting called in and lectured about my lack of professionalism."

  Denver's Heritage Square Music Hall and Country Dinner Playhouse hired her next. During a 1995 performance of Anything Goes at the Country Dinner Playhouse, Michael Brindisi noticed her. He was president and artistic director of the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres in Chanhassen, Minnesota, and he offered her a job. Adams stayed there for three years. She loved the "security and schedule" and says she learned a great deal. Her body, though, was giving out. She listed bursitis in her knees and pulled muscles in her groin among the injuries that kept recurring.

  While at Chanhassen she acted in a black-and-white short satire called The Chromium Hook, her first film. Later, resting a pulled muscle, she went to local auditions for the Hollywood satire Drop Dead Gorgeous, a beauty pageant comedy with Kirsten Dunst, Ellen Barkin and Kirstie Alley. She won the supporting part of a promiscuous cheerleader. Filming happened nearby, so she could shoot the role while performing Brigadoon on stage. Alley's encouragement pushed her to chase a film career. In January 1999 she moved to Los Angeles, a city she remembers as "dark" and "bleak", and she missed Chanhassen.

  Within a week of arriving, she had her first assignment. Fox cast her as Kathryn Merteuil in Manchester Prep, a television spin-off of the film Cruel Intentions. The series went through many script revisions and two production shutdowns before it was canceled. Adams believes one controversial scene was the main reason. Its three filmed episodes were re-edited and released later in 2000 as the direct-to-video Cruel Intentions 2. Reviews were poor, but Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club praised her "vicious glee" in the part.

  Parts as "the bitchy girl" kept coming. In Psycho Beach Party, a 2000 parody of beach party and slasher films, she played a movie star's teenage nemesis as a tribute to Ann-Margret. From 2000 to 2002 she took guest roles on That '70s Show, Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville and The West Wing. After small parts in The Slaughter Rule, Pumpkin and Serving Sara, she landed Brenda Strong, a nurse who falls for Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Catch Me If You Can. Variety's Todd McCarthy admired her "warm presence." Spielberg himself was surprised that she did not break through soon afterward.

  Adams spent the lull in acting classes, concluding that she had "a lot to learn and a lot of self-growth to work through." Then CBS offered her a lucrative place in the cast of the drama Dr. Vegas. She was dropped after a few episodes. She was thirty years old.

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• 4. Junebug and Enchanted

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  Junebug, directed by Phil Morrison, was made for under 1 million dollars, and Adams nearly quit acting once it wrapped. She played Ashley Johnsten, a perky, talkative pregnant woman. Morrison valued her refusal to question her character's basic goodness. Adams connected with Ashley's faith and joined Morrison in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where the film is set, to attend church. She called the shoot "the summer I grew into myself." She dyed her hair red for the part and never went back to blonde.

  Junebug premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, and Adams won a special jury prize there. Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph called the film a "small, quiet miracle." Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post praised her "radiant portrayal." Adams collected the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female and the Critics' Choice Award for Best Supporting Actress. She also earned her first Oscar nomination, in the supporting category.

  The momentum did not carry straight forward. Later in 2005 she appeared in two critically panned films, The Wedding Date and Standing Still. She also played Jim's girlfriend Katy in three episodes of The Office. In 2006's Talladega Nights, she was Will Ferrell's romantic interest, a part critic Peter Travers considered "quite a comedown" from Junebug.

  Enchanted, released in 2007, was different. Adams played Giselle, a cheerful princess-to-be modeled on the Disney Princess franchise, with Patrick Dempsey and James Marsden as her romantic interests. About 250 actresses auditioned. The studio preferred a bigger star, but director Kevin Lima insisted on Adams because of her commitment and her refusal to judge Giselle. Her ball gown weighed 45 pounds, and she fell several times under it. She sang three songs on the soundtrack, "True Love's Kiss," "Happy Working Song" and "That's How You Know."

  Roger Ebert found her "fresh and winning" in a role that depends on effortless lovability. The film grossed over 340 million dollars worldwide, and Adams received a Golden Globe nomination. Todd McCarthy called it her breakthrough and compared her rise to that of Julie Andrews.

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• 5. Against Type

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  Shanley first approached Natalie Portman about the nun in Doubt, John Patrick Shanley's adaptation of his own play. He then offered it to Adams, because her innocent yet intelligent manner reminded him of Ingrid Bergman. The 2008 film starred Meryl Streep as a Catholic school principal and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the priest she accuses. Adams called working with them a "master class." She earned Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations.

  Doubt was one of three 2008 releases, with Sunshine Cleaning and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, in which she played cheerful, innocent women. Asked about the typecasting, Adams said she responds to joyful characters. She insisted they differed greatly. "Naïveté is not stupidity, and innocent people are often very complex."

  In 2009 she played Amelia Earhart in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, the first film shot inside the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Adams felt it was the first time she had been allowed to play a confident character. The film grossed 413 million dollars. That year she also starred in Julie & Julia as Julie Powell, who blogs her way through Julia Child's cookbook. To prepare she enrolled at the Institute of Culinary Education.

  David O. Russell cast her against type in The Fighter, in 2010, to shake off her girl-next-door image. She played Charlene Fleming, the aggressive barmaid girlfriend of boxer Micky Ward, opposite Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. Russell wanted the character's strength found in silence, which challenged her. She took an exotic dance class with trainer Sheila Kelley to find the role's eroticism. Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal marveled at her range. She lost both the Oscar and the Golden Globe to Melissa Leo.

  Paul Thomas Anderson gave her another fierce woman in The Master, in 2012. Adams played Peggy Dodd, the manipulative wife of a cult leader portrayed by Hoffman. It was their third and final collaboration, and Hoffman died two years later. Journalists linked the cult to Scientology. Adams thought the comparison misleading but welcomed the attention. She says the part left her on edge in private life. Justin Chang compared her to Lady Macbeth, writing that her "pertness has rarely seemed so malevolent." She again received Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations.

  American Hustle, from Russell again, followed in 2013. Inspired by the Abscam scandal of the 1970s, it cast her as a seductive con artist. Adams worked closely with Bale on their characters and suggested a scene in which Jennifer Lawrence's character kisses her. Russell was hard on her and often made her cry, and she feared carrying that experience home to her daughter. She won the Golden Globe and received her fifth Oscar nomination, her first for Best Actress. Both she and the film were nominated for Best Picture-level honors, with the film itself up for Best Picture.

  She first declined Big Eyes, in 2014, to avoid another naive woman. Then the birth of her daughter in 2010 changed her view. She found strength in Margaret Keane's passivity and drew on times she had not stood up for herself. Keane's paintings of big-eyed waifs had been credited to her husband Walter. Adams practiced painting and studied how Keane worked. Keane liked the result. The role brought a second consecutive Golden Globe, the same prize she had just won for American Hustle.

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• 6. Capes and Linguists

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  Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, in 2013, gave Adams the role of Lois Lane after she had lost out on two earlier Superman films. Henry Cavill starred as the hero. Peter Bradshaw thought Lois sketchily conceived and found little chemistry between the leads. The film grossed 670 million dollars, one of her biggest hits. That same year Spike Jonze cast her in Her as the close friend of a lonely man, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who falls for an artificial intelligence voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Jonze had seen her unsuccessful audition tapes for Where the Wild Things Are in 2009 and went back to them. She liked the chance to play a platonic friendship between a man and a woman, which she thought rare in film.

  Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, in 2016, brought Lois back. Critics faulted the film for favoring visual effects over a coherent story, yet it grossed 874 million dollars, her highest total to date. Justice League followed in 2017, her third turn as Lois. Tim Grierson of Screen International wrote that she supplied emotional resonance but was wasted in a thankless supporting part.

  Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve from Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life," ranks among her most acclaimed films. Adams played Louise Banks, a linguist hired by the U.S. government to interpret the language of extraterrestrials, who has strange visions. She watched documentaries on linguistics and loved playing an intellectual lead. Christopher Orr of The Atlantic called her performance "mesmerizingly open, by turns uplifting and sorrowful." The film grossed over 200 million dollars against a production budget of 47 million. She received Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, but no Oscar nomination, which disappointed several journalists.

  Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals came the same year. Based on Austin Wright's novel Tony and Susan, it follows Susan, an unhappily married art dealer traumatized by a violent novel written by her ex-husband, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Adams saw little of herself in the poised, aloof Susan and modeled her on Ford.

  Sharp Objects brought her to HBO in 2018. Adams served as an executive producer and starred as Camille Preaker, a self-harming reporter who returns to her hometown to cover the murders of two young girls. She gained weight and sat through three hours of prosthetic makeup on filming days to create her character's scarred body. She read A Bright Red Scream and researched Munchausen syndrome by proxy. She could not detach from the role and suffered insomnia. James Poniewozik of The New York Times found her "transfixing." She received a Primetime Emmy nomination.

  Vice, also from 2018, reunited her with Christian Bale for a third time, with Adam McKay directing. They played Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne. Adams read Lynne's books and, though she disagreed with her politics, approached her with empathy. Eric Kohn of IndieWire liked her "embodying an underwritten Lady Macbeth with ferocious energy." She earned Golden Globe nominations for both Vice and Sharp Objects, plus her sixth Oscar nomination and seventh BAFTA nomination.

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• 7. Songs, Stage and Streaming

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  The Muppets, in 2011, had Adams singing seven songs opposite Jason Segel in live-action roles. Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly said it marked a return to her comedian-sweetheart image. A year later, Adams played the Baker's Wife in the Public Theater's revival of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, at the open-air Delacorte Theater as part of Shakespeare in the Park. It was her New York stage debut and her first theater work in 13 years. She took it to face a challenge that seemed insurmountable. Film commitments allowed only four weeks of rehearsal, and she worked with a private singing coach. Ben Brantley of The New York Times praised her lucidly spoken and sung performance but missed a nervy restlessness in the part.

  Hillbilly Elegy, in 2020, was based on JD Vance's book. Adams played his substance-abusing mother, and a Rolling Stone reviewer thought dependable work was trapped in a poorly written film. She still received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. The Woman in the Window, in which she played an agoraphobic murder witness, was filmed in 2018. It was delayed by poor test screenings and then the COVID-19 pandemic before reaching Netflix in 2021. Dear Evan Hansen, in which she played a grieving mother, followed. Both films were poorly received.

  In 2022 she made her West End debut in The Glass Menagerie at the Duke of York's Theatre. She played Amanda, a matriarch raising her children, drawing on her own mother's fierce determination. Dominic Cavendish of The Daily Telegraph found her quietly heart-breaking, while Nick Curtis of the Evening Standard found her muted and unconvincing. Disenchanted, the Enchanted sequel, premiered on Disney+ on the 18th of November 2022. She recorded six songs for it. Critics noted her enduring charm but ranked the sequel below the original.

  In 2019 Adams formed the production company Bond Group Entertainment with her manager Stacy O'Neil. Their first release, in 2024, was Nightbitch, adapted from a satirical novel, in which she played a struggling mother who sometimes turns into a dog. She related to the material because she felt exhausted balancing parenting with performing on stage. Critics were polarized, which Adams said was the film's intent. She received a Golden Globe nomination. In 2025 she voiced the title character in the animated miniseries Charlotte's Web on HBO MAX.

  More work is lined up. She will star with Jenna Ortega in Taika Waititi's Klara and the Sun, from Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, and in Kornél Mundruczó's drama At the Sea. Star Wars: Starfighter is scheduled for the 28th of May 2027, directed by Shawn Levy, who directed her in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

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• 8. Craft and Private Life

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  Warner Loughlin has coached Adams in a method that starts with building a character's backstory from age three. Adams says it helps her organize and structure her thoughts. She prefers confident directors who leave room for her own thinking. She stays in character during filming and finds it hard to let go of roles and accents. Size of part does not sway her, and she is drawn to leads and supporting parts alike. She calls herself an obsessive performer.

  Meryl Streep says Adams arrives highly prepared and has "a gigantic intelligence" for developing a character's arc. Paul Thomas Anderson praises her dedication. Jake Coyle of The Washington Times describes an actress who stays herself while inhabiting a role with warmth and smarts. Novelist Stephen Marche called her "the greatest actress of her generation." Robert Ito of The New York Times thinks her appetite for risky projects keeps her from being a bigger box-office draw. Her films have still grossed over 4.7 billion dollars worldwide.

  Forbes counted her earnings at over 13 million dollars in 2014 and 2016, and over 11 million in 2017. She appeared on its Celebrity 100 list in 2014, the same year Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame arrived in 2017.

  She met the actor and painter Darren Le Gallo at an acting class in 2001. A year later they began dating while working on a short film, Pennies. They became engaged in 2008, and their daughter Aviana is named after Adams's birthplace of Aviano. Seven years after the engagement, they married in a private ceremony at a ranch near Santa Barbara, California. They live in Beverly Hills. Adams says Le Gallo has made many sacrifices as the family's primary caregiver. Her routine is work, trips to the park with her daughter and weekly date nights.

  Adams distrusts celebrity and believes the "more that people know about me, the less they'll believe me and my characters." She draws little tabloid attention. She has spoken of lifelong insecurity, which motherhood eased, and she often bursts into song when stressed at work. She has joined other actors in calling for equal pay for women in film, though she thinks producers, not actresses, should be asked to explain the pay gap.

  Because her early years in the industry were hard, Adams works with underprivileged students at New York City's Ghetto Film School, and Variety honored her for it in 2010. She backs the Trevor Project, which supports troubled LGBT teenagers. In 2013 she launched The Beauty Book for Brain Cancer to raise money for the charities Snog and Headrush. With Jennifer Garner in 2020 she began #SaveWithStories to promote children's education during pandemic school closures. As an ambassador for The RightWay Foundation, which provides employment and mental health services to former foster youth, she earned a second Variety honor in 2024.

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