Scarlett Johansson

• 1. Introduction

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  Scarlett Johansson was born on the 22nd of November 1984 in the Manhattan borough of New York City, and by the time she was nine years old she had already appeared on national television. What followed was a career that would make her the second-highest-grossing actor in history, the world's highest-paid actress in three separate years, and the subject of a landmark lawsuit against one of the largest entertainment companies on earth. How a child who stared into a mirror until she made herself cry, practicing the emotions of Judy Garland, became all of that is a story worth sitting with.

• 2. Roots and Early Hunger

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  Karsten Olaf Johansson, her father, is an architect from Copenhagen, Denmark, and through him Scarlett traces a lineage that includes an art historian, screenwriter, and film director named Ejner Johansson. Her mother, Melanie Sloan, worked as a producer. The family on her mother's side fled Poland and Russia, originally carrying the surname Schlamberg; Johansson has described herself as Jewish. A 2017 episode of PBS's Finding Your Roots brought her the discovery that her maternal great-grandfather's brother and his extended family died in the Warsaw Ghaw during the Holocaust.

  She grew up with a twin brother named Hunter, an older sister named Vanessa, who is also an actress, an older brother named Adrian, and an older half-brother named Christian from her father's first marriage. Her parents divorced when she was thirteen. The person she felt closest to was her maternal grandmother Dorothy Sloan, a bookkeeper and schoolteacher whom she described as her best friend.

  From an early age she put on song-and-dance routines at home, drawn particularly to musical theater and jazz hands. At age seven she was devastated when a talent agent signed one of her brothers rather than her, but she kept going. She enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and auditioned for commercials, then grew disenchanted, stating she did not want to promote Wonder Bread. She shifted toward film and theater instead, making her first stage appearance with two lines in the off-Broadway play Sophistry alongside Ethan Hawke, while studying at the Professional Children's School in Manhattan.

• 3. Child Actress to Leading Lady

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  At age nine, Johansson landed her first paid role as a sketch character on an episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. That same year she made her film debut in the fantasy comedy North (1994), playing John Ritter's daughter. Her first leading role came in Manny & Lo (1996), where she played Amanda, the younger sister of a pregnant teenager who runs away from her foster home. A critic at the San Francisco Chronicle observed her "peaceful aura" and speculated that if she could sustain it through adolescence she could become an important actress. She earned a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Female for that performance.

  The Horse Whisperer (1998), directed by and co-starring Robert Redford, drew wider attention. It was her seventh role, and Redford described her as "13 going on 30." She received an "introducing" credit on the film and a nomination for the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Most Promising Actress. The experience crystallized something for her: she came to understand that acting is the ability to manipulate one's own emotions.

  Her breakthrough came playing a cynical outcast in Terry Zwigoff's black comedy Ghost World (2001), an adaptation of Daniel Clowes' graphic novel. Zwigoff, having seen her audition tape from New York, considered her a "unique, eccentric person, and right for that part." Despite being a box office failure on release, the film developed a cult following, and Johansson won a Toronto Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress. After graduating from the Professional Children's School, she applied to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, was rejected, and chose to focus entirely on film.

• 4. Sofia Coppola and Peter Webber

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  Lost in Translation (2003), directed by Sofia Coppola, became the pivot point. Coppola had first noticed Johansson in Manny & Lo and compared her to a young Lauren Bacall, structuring the film's emotional core around the relationship between Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946). The film was made on a budget of $4 million and grossed $119 million at the box office. Roger Ebert praised the lead performances as "wonderful," and the New York Times singled out Johansson, who was seventeen at the time of filming, for convincingly playing an older character. She won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress for the role.

  Also in 2003, Peter Webber's Girl with a Pearl Earring cast Johansson as Griet, a young seventeenth-century servant in the household of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, played by Colin Firth. Webber had interviewed 150 actors before choosing her. Johansson deliberately avoided reading Tracy Chevalier's source novel, wanting to approach the story fresh. Anthony Lane, writing for The New Yorker, said the film belonged entirely to her, describing the "ardor with which she can summon a closeup and bloom under its gaze." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly noted her "nearly silent performance" and its intense dramatic charge.

  Variety declared that her two roles in 2003 established her as among the most versatile actresses of her generation. Both films also earned her simultaneous Best Actress nominations at the 61st Golden Globe Awards, making her one of nine actors to receive a double nomination in the same category in the same year at BAFTA.

• 5. Woody Allen and the Expanding Range

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  Match Point (2005) was the first of three films Johansson made with Woody Allen. She replaced Kate Winslet in the role of Nola, an aspiring actress who begins an affair with a married man, and Allen adjusted the character's nationality from British to American for her. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that she was "a powerhouse from the word go" with a performance that "borders on astonishing." Allen himself, during filming, remarked on her attractiveness, calling her "beautiful" and "sexually overwhelming."

  Also in 2005, she starred opposite Ewan McGregor in Michael Bay's science fiction film The Island, playing dual roles. She described shooting fourteen hours a day and injuring herself on set. The following year she appeared in two films about stage magicians, both opposite Hugh Jackman: Allen's Scoop and Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. Nolan sought her specifically because he thought she possessed "ambiguity" and a "shielded quality."

  The third Allen collaboration, Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), filmed in Spain and co-starring Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, became one of Allen's most profitable pictures. Between those projects she released her debut album in May 2008: Anywhere I Lay My Head, which consisted of one original song and ten cover versions of Tom Waits songs. Johansson had been listening to Waits since she was eleven or twelve years old. The album reached number 126 on the Billboard 200 and was named the 23rd best album of 2008 by NME. In September 2009, she released a collaborative album with singer-songwriter Pete Yorn, Break Up, inspired by Serge Gainsbourg's duets with Brigitte Bardot; that record reached number 41 in the United States.

• 6. Black Widow and the MCU

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  Iron Man 2 (2010) brought Johansson into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Black Widow, a role she would reprise in eight films over more than a decade. She came to the part after Emily Blunt was forced to opt out due to other obligations. Before her casting was confirmed, Johansson dyed her hair red to persuade director Jon Favreau she was right for the role. The film earned $623.9 million against its $200 million budget. Critics praised the picture broadly but noted that her character had little to do beyond look attractive.

  The Avengers (2012), which broke many box office records and became the third highest-grossing film both in the United States and worldwide at the time, deepened her preparation: she learned some Russian from a former teacher by phone for the role. In 2014, Captain America: The Winter Soldier grossed over $714 million worldwide, and critic Odie Henderson saw "genuine emotional shorthand at work, especially from Johansson."

  During the same period, Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) and Captain America: Civil War (2016) each earned more than $1.1 billion. A mixture of close-ups, concealing costumes, stunt doubles, and visual effects was used during the filming of Age of Ultron to conceal her pregnancy. When Avengers: Endgame arrived in 2019, it became the highest-grossing film of all time.

  Her solo prequel film, Black Widow (2021), on which she also served as executive producer, set up the lawsuit that followed. In July 2021 she sued Disney, claiming that the simultaneous release on Disney+ breached a contract clause guaranteeing exclusive theatrical release and denied her box office bonuses. Disney responded by disclosing that she had already received $20 million for the film. Creative Artists Agency co-chairman Bryan Lourd publicly criticized Disney for attacking her character and revealing her salary. The dispute was resolved in September 2021, and Variety later reported she received over $40 million in the settlement.

• 7. Beyond the Superhero Suit

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  Her (2013) gave Johansson a role with no image at all: the voice of Samantha, a self-aware computer operating system, in Spike Jonze's film. She replaced Samantha Morton in the part. At the 8th Rome International Film Festival the film's premiere brought her a Best Actress prize. Peter Travers described her voice as "sweet, sexy, caring, manipulative, scary and award-worthy."

  Under the Skin (2013), Jonathan Glazer's adaptation of Michel Faber's novel, took nine years to complete. Johansson played an extraterrestrial creature disguised as a human woman who preys on men in Scotland. She learned to drive a van, adopted an English accent, and improvised conversations with non-professional actors on the street who did not know they were being filmed. Erin Whitney, writing for The Huffington Post, called it her finest performance to that point.

  Marriage Story (2019), a Netflix drama directed by Noah Baumbach, and Jojo Rabbit (2019), a satire directed by Taika Waititi, arrived in the same awards season. Waititi modeled her character in Jojo Rabbit on his own mother and cast Johansson specifically to give her a chance to perform comedy. The two films together made her the twelfth performer ever to receive Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress in the same year. She received her first two Oscar nominations for those performances. Johansson noted a personal connection to the Marriage Story role, as she was going through her own divorce proceedings during filming.

  In 2023, Wes Anderson cast her in Asteroid City. For two months of work, she took a substantial pay cut, earning $4,131 a week. She made her directorial debut with Eleanor the Great, starring June Squibb in the title role; the film premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and was released on the 26th of September 2025.

• 8. A Life Off Screen

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  Johansson holds dual American and Danish citizenship. She attended PS 41 elementary school in Greenwich Village, and her parents divorced when she was thirteen. While a student at the Professional Children's School, she dated classmate Jack Antonoff from 2001 to 2002. She later dated her Black Dahlia co-star Josh Hartnett for roughly two years, and began dating Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds in April 2007. They married in September 2008 in a wilderness retreat on Vancouver Island, separated in December 2010, and divorced in July 2011. Reflecting on it later, she told Vanity Fair in 2019 that at age twenty-three she had not fully understood what marriage was.

  In November 2012 she began dating French journalist Romain Dauriac, owner of an advertising agency. They became engaged the following September, divided their time between New York and Paris, and she gave birth to their daughter Rose in 2014. They married in October 2014 in Philipsburg, Montana, separated in mid-2016, and the divorce was finalized in September 2017. She began dating Saturday Night Live co-head writer Colin Jost in May 2017, they became engaged in May 2019, and married in October 2020 at their New York home. She gave birth to their son in August 2021.

  Her grand-uncle, Phillip Schlamberg, was the last American pilot to be killed during World War II. He had flown a bombing mission alongside Jerry Yellin, who later became co-founder of Operation Warrior Wellness, a division of the David Lynch Foundation helping veterans learn Transcendental Meditation. Johansson has given support to that organization, and in May 2024 she publicly criticized OpenAI for releasing a chatbot with a voice she said resembled her own, after she had declined to work with the company to provide her voice for the application.