Elizabeth Olsen

• 1. Introduction

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  Elizabeth Olsen is an American actress who once considered dropping her surname. Her middle name, Chase, was the alternative she had in mind. The reason was simple. Her older sisters, the twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, were already household names, and she wanted people to notice her talent rather than her family tree. That instinct raises a question that runs through her whole career. How does the youngest member of a famous family become an artist in her own right? The answer involves a childhood spent between ballet studios and film sets, a semester in Russia, a debut that stunned festival audiences, and a role that made her recognizable around the world. It also involves choices that look nothing like the obvious path to stardom.

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• 2. Dancer, Accountant, Actress

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  In August 1994, the children's music label BMG Kidz signed a very young Elizabeth Olsen, even though she never recorded a single song. She was born on the 16th of February 1989 in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. Her mother, Jarnie, is a former dancer and personal manager, and her father, Dave, is a real estate agent. Her father has Norwegian ancestry, and her mother is of French, German and Italian descent. She also has an older brother, James, known as Trent, who was born in 1984. Her parents divorced in 1996, and her father remarried that same year. Through him and his second wife, McKenzie, she has two half-siblings, Courtney and Jake.

  She began acting at the age of four, appearing in projects made by her sisters. These included the 1994 television film How the West Was Fun and the straight-to-video series The Adventures of Mary-Kate & Ashley. The label deal followed the success of the twins' album I Am The Cute One. Growing up, she took ballet lessons and acting classes and spent time at musical theatre camp. For a stretch she chose ballet over acting entirely.

  Her ambitions drifted even further from the screen. At one point she imagined herself working as an accountant on Wall Street. High school brought her back to acting, but the pull was not steady, and one episode in 2004 nearly ended it.

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• 3. The Training Years

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  The year 2004 nearly ended her acting career before it properly began. Media attention aimed at her sister Mary-Kate, who was struggling with an eating disorder, made Olsen consider quitting. She stayed, and she attended Campbell Hall School in Studio City, Los Angeles.

  After high school she enrolled at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and majored in drama. During college she took classes at the Atlantic Theater Company. Then she spent a semester at the Moscow Art Theatre School in Russia. That semester changed her attitude, and she began to take acting more seriously than she ever had before.

  Her first professional footholds were understudy jobs. She understudied in the 2008 off-Broadway production of the play Dust and in the 2009 Broadway production of the play Impressionism. Those jobs led to her first agent. She also earned a real estate license in New York after moving there, a small echo of her father's profession. Olsen graduated from NYU in January 2013, and by then her first film had already made her a name at Sundance.

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• 4. A Breakthrough at Sundance

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  At the Sundance Film Festival, two films starring Elizabeth Olsen premiered side by side. The first was the 2011 thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene, her film debut. She played the title character, a young woman who flees a cult and returns to her family while suffering from delusions. Critics embraced both the film and her performance. She earned nominations including the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actress and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. She has said she was drawn to the role because of her own fascination with mental illnesses.

  The second Sundance premiere was the horror film Silent House. Her work in it drew what the source describes as rave reviews. Although it debuted at the festival with Martha Marcy May Marlene, it reached audiences in 2012. That same year she also starred in the thriller Red Lights and the comedy Liberal Arts.

  The recognition spread well beyond one festival. Her name appeared on the award lists of many critics' groups across the United States, from Chicago to Toronto. In January 2013, she received a nomination for the BAFTA Rising Star Award at the 66th British Academy Film Awards.

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• 5. Range Beyond the Cape

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  Kill Your Darlings gave her the part of Edie Parker, the first wife of novelist Jack Kerouac. Parker also wrote You'll Be Okay, a memoir of the Beat Generation. In the American remake of the 2003 South Korean film Oldboy, Olsen played Marie Sebastian, a nurse who helps Josh Brolin's character search for his daughter.

  On stage that same year she played the title role in an off-Broadway production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet at the Classic Stage Company. Ben Brantley of The New York Times described her Juliet as "alternating between saucy petulance and hysteria". In 2014 she led In Secret, an adaptation of Émile Zola's 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin. She then starred in the monster film Godzilla opposite Bryan Cranston and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. It grossed $529 million against a $160 million production budget. She also appeared with Dakota Fanning in Very Good Girls, which reviewers treated far less kindly.

  In 2015 she played Audrey Williams, the wife, manager and duet partner of singer Hank Williams, in I Saw the Light. Tom Hiddleston played Hank Williams. In August 2017 she appeared in two films that critics praised. In Wind River she played a novice FBI agent, though David Edelstein of Vulture found her "incongruously high-schoolish demeanor" problematic. In Ingrid Goes West she played a social media influencer, and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it a "major eye-opener of a performance" and "toxic perfection". In 2018 she appeared in the Netflix film Kodachrome as a caregiver to a photographer played by Ed Harris.

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• 6. Becoming Scarlet Witch

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  The character who made Olsen famous first appeared for only a moment. In a post-credits scene of the 2014 film Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Wanda Maximoff showed up alongside her brother Pietro, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Olsen was uncredited in that cameo.

  The full debut of Wanda Maximoff, also known as Scarlet Witch, came with Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015. It was the first time the comic book character had appeared on film. Olsen gave her an accent from a fictional country called Sokovia, which she described as similar to Slovak. She went on to play the character in Captain America: Civil War in 2016 and Avengers: Infinity War in 2018. Then came Avengers: Endgame in 2019, which became the second highest-grossing film of all time. With this role, Olsen rose to fame.

  The character kept returning. Olsen made an uncredited cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021. She voiced versions of Wanda in the animated series What If...? and, on the 24th of September 2025, in Marvel Zombies. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, released in May 2022, reviews of the film were mixed. Her own performance was praised, and Owen Gleiberman of Variety wrote that it "generates an operatic fire".

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• 7. The Television Turn

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  Olsen spent three years developing Sorry for Your Loss before a single frame aired. She executive produced the Facebook Watch series and starred as Leigh Shaw, a young widow. She said the long development gave her time to absorb the character's impulses. The show premiered in September 2018, and critics reviewed it positively. Her performance was called "stunning", "disciplined and sharp" and "slyly sympathetic". It earned her a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination for Best Actress in a Drama Series. The show was canceled in January 2020 after two seasons.

  In January 2021, WandaVision premiered on Disney+. Paul Bettany joined her as Vision, and critics praised the chemistry between the two. Alex Abad-Santos of Vox called her brilliant, and Linda Holmes of NPR highlighted her "indelible central performance". The role earned Olsen a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. It also brought a Golden Globe Award nomination.

  The next major television role moved far from superheroes. In the HBO Max limited series Love & Death, she played housewife Candy Montgomery, in a story about a 1980 killing in Texas. That performance earned her another Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Miniseries or Television Film.

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• 8. Life Off Screen

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  Diane Keaton is the person Olsen credits as a primary influence on her acting and her life. Keaton helped her figure out "the kind of woman I wanted to be, because I hadn't seen the woman I felt connected to in films. I was like, I'm not the sexy one, I'm not the nerd, I don't know where I fit." Her sisters have also influenced her and offered career advice.

  Olsen says she became an atheist at the age of 13. Her reasoning is that "religion should be about community and having a place to go in prayer, not something that should determine women's freedoms." She is also an ambassador for Bobbi Brown Cosmetics. From 2011 to 2014 she was in a relationship with actor Boyd Holbrook.

  In July 2019, she became engaged to musician Robbie Arnett of the American band Milo Greene, after three years of dating. The couple secretly eloped later that same year and live in Los Angeles. Together they wrote two children's books about a young detective, Hattie Harmony: Worry Detective in June 2022 and Hattie Harmony: Opening Night in June 2023. Their own experiences with anxiety inspired the books.

  On the 26th of November 2025, Olsen's fantasy romance Eternity reached audiences. She played Joan alongside Miles Teller and Callum Turner in a romantic comedy directed by David Freyne, and she also served as executive producer. Before that, she starred in Azazel Jacobs' drama His Three Daughters, another project she executive produced. She also appeared in the science fiction thriller The Assessment.

  The 26th of February 2027 is the release date set for Sam Esmail's thriller Panic Carefully, her next announced film. A reunion is also in the works. In 2025, Deadline reported that FX had ordered a pilot for the drama series Seven Sisters. The project would bring her back together with director Sean Durkin, who guided her debut in Martha Marcy May Marlene.

  Several more projects are attached to her name. They include Todd Solondz's dark comedy Love Child with Charles Melton and the Apple TV+ limited series Once There Were Wolves, adapted from Charlotte McConaghy's novel. Panos Cosmatos' vampire thriller Flesh Of The Gods would pair her with Wagner Moura and Kristen Stewart.

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