Saoirse Ronan

• 1. Introduction

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  Saoirse Ronan was born on the 12th of April 1994 in the Bronx, in New York City, to Irish parents who were living in the United States without legal papers. Her first name is pronounced SUR-shə. Twenty-five years and six months later, she had collected four Academy Award nominations. Only Jennifer Lawrence had reached that mark at a younger age.

  The path between those two points is stranger than a simple child-star story. She grew up mostly in Ireland, and she was a teenager when Hollywood first noticed her. Her best-known work sits in corsets, wartime dresses and Victorian parlours, yet she also played an assassin, a vampire and a half-alien rebel. Why did a girl from Carlow keep getting cast as other people's idea of history? What happened when her risks failed? And what does she do when no one has written the part she wants to play?

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• 2. Between Two Countries

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  Dublin was where the Ronan family landed when Saoirse was three years old, after a period of real money trouble in New York. Her father had worked in construction and in bars before training as an actor. Her mother had worked as a nanny and had acted as a child. Both had left Ireland because of the recession of the 1980s.

  Ardattin, in County Carlow, is where Saoirse was raised. She went to Ardattin National School, and her parents later had her tutored privately at home. By her early teens the family was back in Dublin, settled in the seaside village of Howth.

  She was brought up Catholic, though she has said she questioned her faith as a child. When asked who shaped her as a performer, she names Dame Maggie Smith.

  Her sense of belonging stayed divided. She holds both Irish and American citizenship. She has said, "I don't know where I am from. I'm just Irish." She also calls herself a New Yorker.

  Home stayed close for a long time. She lived with her parents until she was 19, and her mother came with her to film sets in her teens. Ronan credits her mother with shielding her from uncomfortable situations. The first set she worked on without either parent was a Wes Anderson production in 2014.

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• 3. Before the Big Break

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  RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, gave Ronan her first screen job in 2003, a part in the prime time medical drama The Clinic. She also appeared in the mini-serial Proof. Then came a near miss. She auditioned for Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and the role went to another Irish actress, Evanna Lynch.

  Her first film was the romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman, directed by Amy Heckerling and shot in 2005. Financing was hard to find and several deals collapsed during post-production. A few international markets saw it in 2007, and the United States got a direct-to-video release in 2008. Ronan played Michelle Pfeiffer's daughter, with Paul Rudd as the love interest. Joe Leydon of Variety called it desperately unfunny, though he liked the pairing of mother and daughter.

  Then, at 12, she attended a casting call for Joe Wright's adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement. She won the part of Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old aspiring novelist whose false accusation against her sister's lover ruins several lives. Keira Knightley and James McAvoy played the people around her.

  The film cost US$30 million and earned more than US$129 million worldwide. Christopher Orr of The Atlantic praised how she captured the narcissism and self-doubt that come with precocity. Ronan was nominated for a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She became the seventh youngest nominee ever in that category.

  The next films were harder. Death Defying Acts and City of Ember, in which she played the heroic Lina Mayfleet, both flopped at the box office. Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, with Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci, was waiting in 2009.

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• 4. Dark Turns and Detours

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  Susie Salmon, the 14-year-old narrator of The Lovely Bones, watches her family from the afterlife after she is raped and murdered. Ronan and her family hesitated over the subject matter. They agreed only after Jackson promised the film would avoid gratuitous scenes of violence. Much of her work was shot in front of a blue screen. Reviewers disliked the story, but Richard Corliss of Time said she gave it "immense gravity and grace". The film disappointed at the box office, and she earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

  In Peter Weir's The Way Back, she played Irena, a Polish orphan who joins escaped Siberian convicts on a 4000 mile trek to India. Filming took place in Bulgaria, India and Morocco, with Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell and Ed Harris beside her.

  Hanna, in 2011, reunited her with Joe Wright. She played a 15-year-old raised in the Arctic wilderness to be an assassin, with Eric Bana as her father and Cate Blanchett as a villainous CIA agent. Ronan did her own stunts after several months of training in martial arts, stick fighting and knife fighting. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called her an "acting sorceress". That same year she voiced the lead in the English dub of Studio Ghibli's Arrietty, and at 16 she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Peter Jackson later asked her to play an elf in The Hobbit films, but scheduling conflicts forced her out. She chose Neil Jordan's Byzantium instead, drawn by a project she described as "dark, gothic and twisted". She and Gemma Arterton played mother-and-daughter vampires.

  Not every detour worked. In The Host, from a Stephenie Meyer novel, she played both a human rebel and a parasitic alien, and critics disliked the film. How I Live Now and the animated Justin and the Knights of Valour earned little or drew harsh reviews. Lost River, Ryan Gosling's directing debut, was panned in 2014, though one critic still praised her "tough but vulnerable" Rat. The Grand Budapest Hotel, released the same year, made more than $174 million on a $25 million budget.

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• 5. Costume Dramas and Gerwig

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  Eilis Lacey, a homesick young Irishwoman in 1950s New York, gave Ronan the lead in Brooklyn, based on Colm Tóibín's novel and directed by John Crowley. Ronan felt that Eilis's journey mirrored her own. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that her calm poise anchored almost every scene. The role brought nominations for the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Actress.

  Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird came next, in 2017. Ronan played Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson, a high school senior in a stormy relationship with her mother, played by Laurie Metcalf. The film ranks among the best-reviewed ever on Rotten Tomatoes. A. O. Scott of The New York Times said Ronan was as spontaneous and unpredictable as a real 17-year-old, which implied a stupefying level of craft. She won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical, with Oscar, BAFTA and SAG nominations on top.

  In Mary Queen of Scots, she played Mary Stuart opposite Margot Robbie's Elizabeth I. The two actresses avoided each other until they filmed the pair's climactic meeting, to keep their characters apart. The film also introduced her to the Scottish actor Jack Lowden.

  When Ronan heard Gerwig was adapting Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, she campaigned for the role of Jo March. She read Marmee & Louisa, a biography of Alcott and her mother. The cast rehearsed the script for two weeks, and filming took place in Concord, Massachusetts. Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair praised how she showed Jo's conflicted loyalty. The 2019 film grossed more than $218 million, her highest total.

  In 2020, Ammonite put her opposite Kate Winslet, with Ronan as the geologist Charlotte Murchison in a story about a romance in the 1840s. The two actresses choreographed their own intimate scenes.

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• 6. Onstage

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  A rehearsal room in New York in 2016 marked Ronan's move to Broadway. She played Abigail Williams in a revival of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, directed by Ivo van Hove. The play ran for 125 performances.

  To prepare, Ronan read Stacy Schiff's book The Witches: Salem, 1692. She also worked closely with van Hove to find empathy for a character who is usually seen as a villain. She rejected earlier portrayals and played Abigail as "more victim than victimizer". David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter called her "icy and commanding". Linda Winer of Newsday said she played the part with the duplicity of a malevolent surfer-girl.

  Her London stage debut came at the Almeida Theatre, in 2021, as Lady Macbeth opposite James McArdle in The Tragedy of Macbeth. She admitted Shakespeare intimidated her. For the Macbeths' marriage, she drew on the relationship of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. Alexandra Pollard of The Independent noted her rare skill at making the weighty language easy to understand.

  The Crucible and Macbeth are the only two stage credits in the source, but both were chosen with the same eye for women history has treated harshly.

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• 7. Producing The Outrun

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  Arcade Pictures began as a partnership between Ronan, Jack Lowden and the producer Dominic Norris. Their first production was The Outrun, a 2024 adaptation of Amy Liptrot's memoir directed by Nora Fingscheidt. Ronan also starred as Rona, the character based on Liptrot.

  The role cost her something. She called playing Rona's struggle with alcoholism "very upsetting" because she had seen addiction affect people close to her. Fingscheidt's script lacked specific dialogue for some scenes, so Ronan wrote several of Rona's lines herself. Adrian Horton of The Guardian called the performance "at once titanic and quiet" and convincing even in the difficult art of acting drunk. Ronan earned BAFTA nominations for Best Actress and, as producer, for Outstanding British Film. Lowden and Ronan stepped down from Arcade Pictures soon after the film's premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

  Around it came other choices. See How They Run, in 2022, cast her with Sam Rockwell as police officers solving a murder in 1950s London. One critic praised it as a comedy against type. Foe, a 2023 science fiction film with Paul Mescal, drew dire reviews, her worst reception in years.

  In Steve McQueen's Blitz, she played a distraught mother searching for her missing son during the bombing of London. She was not keen on war films but was drawn by the mother-and-son relationship, and she sang a few songs for the soundtrack.

  On the 5th of June 2025, it was announced that she would star in the Talking Heads video for "Psycho Killer", marking the band's 50th anniversary. She led the comic thriller Bad Apples as a primary school teacher thrown off by an unruly student. On the 31st of October 2025, she was announced as Linda McCartney in Sam Mendes's four-film Beatles project, due in April 2028.

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• 8. Private Life, Public Standing

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  Stephen Fry is the reason Ronan joined Twitter in late 2009, because she admired his enthusiastic use of it. She soon deleted the account. In February 2018 she explained that she understood why musicians and journalists use social media. Acting, she said, is different, because "you're not yourself when you're working" and self-promotion makes her uncomfortable.

  She has been in a relationship with Jack Lowden since 2018. In July 2024, the Irish Independent reported that they had married in a secret ceremony in Edinburgh. They welcomed their first child in 2025. She bought a house in Greystones in 2018 and sold it in 2019, then bought another in West Cork in 2020.

  Her causes are specific. She is an ambassador for the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. In 2016 she backed Home Sweet Home, an anti-homelessness campaign that illegally occupied a Dublin office building to house 31 homeless families. She also appeared in Hozier's "Cherry Wine" video, which drew attention to domestic violence. She voted for same-sex marriage in Ireland's 2015 referendum and supported the 2018 campaign to legalise abortion.

  Praise for her work has been steady. In 2020, The New York Times ranked her tenth among the greatest actors of the 21st century, and The Irish Times placed her sixth among Ireland's greatest film actors. Clayton Davis of Variety compared her career to those of Kate Winslet and Cate Blanchett. Forbes featured her on two of its 30 Under 30 lists in 2016. In 2020 she wore an Oscars dress made from the leftover fabric of her BAFTA dress, as a nod to sustainable fashion.

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