Scarlett Johansson

Scarlett Ingrid Johansson  born November 22, 1984 is an American actress and singer. She was the world’s highest-paid actress in 2018 and 2019, and has featured multiple times on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list. Her films have grossed over $14.3 billion worldwide, making Johansson the ninth-highest-grossing box office star of all time. She is the recipient of several accolades, including a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and five Golden Globe Awards.

Born and raised in Manhattan, New York City, Johansson aspired to be an actress from a young age and first appeared on stage in an Off-Broadway play as a child actor. She made her film debut in the fantasy comedy North (1994), and gained early recognition for her roles in Manny & Lo (1996), The Horse Whisperer (1998), and Ghost World (2001). Johansson shifted to adult roles in 2003 with her performances in Lost in Translation, which won her a BAFTA Award for Best Actress, and Girl with a Pearl Earring. She was nominated for Golden Globe Awards for these films, and for playing a troubled teenager in the drama A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004), and a seductress in the psychological thriller Match Point (2005). Other works during this period include The Prestige (2006) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008); and the albums Anywhere I Lay My Head (2008) and Break Up (2009), both of which charted on the Billboard 200.

In 2010, Johansson debuted on Broadway in a revival of A View from the Bridge, which won her a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress, and began playing the role of Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man 2 won her critical acclaim. Johansson went on to star in the science fiction films Her (2013), Under the Skin (2013), Lucy (2014), and Ghost in the Shell (2017). She received critical acclaim and two Academy Award nominations for playing an actress going through a divorce in the drama Marriage Story and a single mother in Nazi Germany in the satire Jojo Rabbit (both 2019).

As a public figure, Johansson is a prominent brand endorser and supports various charities. She has been cited as a Hollywood sex symbol by various media outlets. She was married to Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds from 2008 to 2011, and to French businessman Romain Dauriac, with whom she has a daughter, from 2014 to 2017. In 2020, Johansson married comedian Colin Jost.

Early life

Scarlett Ingrid Johansson was born on November 22, 1984, in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Her father, Karsten Olaf Johansson, is an architect originally from Copenhagen, Denmark. Her paternal grandfather, Ejner Johansson, was an art historian, screenwriter, and film director, and his father was Swedish. Scarlett’s mother, Melanie Sloan, a New Yorker, has worked as a producer. She comes from an Ashkenazi Jewish family from Poland and Russia, originally surnamed Schlamberg, and Scarlett has described herself as Jewish. She has an older sister, Vanessa, also an actress; an older brother, Adrian; and a twin brother, Hunter. Johansson also has an older half-brother, Christian, from her father’s first marriage. She holds dual American and Danish citizenship.

Johansson attended PS 41, an elementary school in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Her parents divorced when she was 13. Johansson was particularly close to her maternal grandmother, Dorothy Sloan, a bookkeeper and schoolteacher; they often spent time together and Johansson considered Sloan her best friend. Interested in a career in the spotlight from an early age, she often put on song-and-dance routines for her family. She was particularly fond of musical theater and jazz hands. She took lessons in tap dance, and states that her parents were supportive of her career choice. She describes her childhood as very ordinary.

As a child, Johansson practiced acting by staring in the mirror until she made herself cry, wanting to be Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis. At age seven, she was devastated when a talent agent signed one of her brothers instead of her, but she later decided to become an actress anyway. She enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, and began auditioning for commercials, but soon lost interest: “I didn’t want to promote Wonder Bread.” She shifted her focus to film and theater, making her first stage appearance in the Off-Broadway play Sophistry with Ethan Hawke, in which she had two lines. Around this time, she began studying at Professional Children’s School (PCS), a private educational institution for aspiring child actors in Manhattan. At age nine, Johansson made her film debut as John Ritter’s daughter in the fantasy comedy North (1994). She says that when she was on the film set, she knew intuitively what to do. Johansson later played minor roles including as the daughter of Sean Connery and Kate Capshaw’s characters in the mystery thriller Just Cause (1995), and an art student in If Lucy Fell (1996).

Acting career

1996–2002: Early roles

Johansson’s first leading role was as Amanda, the younger sister of a pregnant teenager who runs away from her foster home in Manny & Lo (1996) alongside Aleksa Palladino and her brother, Hunter. Her performance received positive reviews: one written for the San Francisco Chronicle noted, ” grows on you, largely because of the charm of … Scarlett Johansson,” while critic Mick LaSalle, writing for the same paper, commented on her “peaceful aura”, and believed, “If she can get through puberty with that aura undisturbed, she could become an important actress.” Johansson earned a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Female for the role.

After appearing in minor roles in Fall and Home Alone 3 (both 1997), Johansson attracted wider attention for her performance in the film The Horse Whisperer (1998), directed by Robert Redford. The drama film, based on the 1995 novel of the same name by Nicholas Evans, tells the story of a talented trainer with a gift for understanding horses, who is hired to help an injured teenager played by Johansson. The actress received an “introducing” credit on this film, although it was her seventh role. On Johansson’s maturity, Redford described her as “13 going on 30”. Todd McCarthy of Variety commented that Johansson “convincingly conveys the awkwardness of her age and the inner pain of a carefree girl suddenly laid low by horrible happenstance”. For the film, she was nominated for the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Most Promising Actress. She believed that the film changed many things in her life, realizing that acting is the ability to manipulate one’s emotions. On finding good roles as a teenager, Johansson said it was hard for her as adults wrote the scripts and they “portray kids like mall rats and not seriously … Kids and teenagers just aren’t being portrayed with any real depth”.

Johansson later appeared in My Brother the Pig (1999) and in the neo-noir, Coen brothers film The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). Her breakthrough came playing a cynical outcast in Terry Zwigoff’s black comedy Ghost World (2001), an adaptation of Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel of the same name. Johansson auditioned for the film via a tape from New York, and Zwigoff believed her to be “a unique, eccentric person, and right for that part”. The film premiered at the 2001 Seattle International Film Festival; it was a box office failure, but has since developed a cult status. Johansson was credited with “sensitivity and talent belie her age” by an Austin Chronicle critic, and won a Toronto Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.

With David Arquette, Johansson appeared in the horror comedy Eight Legged Freaks (2002), about a collection of spiders that are exposed to toxic waste, causing them to grow to gigantic proportions and begin killing and harvesting. After graduating from Professional Children’s School that year, she applied to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; she decided to focus on her film career when she was rejected.

2003–2004: Transition to adult roles

Johansson transitioned from teen to adult roles with two films in 2003: the romantic comedy-drama Lost in Translation and the drama Girl with a Pearl Earring. In the former, directed by Sofia Coppola, she plays Charlotte, a listless and lonely young wife, opposite Bill Murray. Coppola had first noticed Johansson in Manny & Lo, and compared her to a young Lauren Bacall; Coppola based the film’s story on the relationship between Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946). Johansson found the experience of working with a female director different because of Coppola’s ability to empathize with her. Made on a budget of $4 million, the film grossed $119 million at the box office and received critical acclaim. Roger Ebert was pleased with the film and described the lead actors’ performances as “wonderful”, and Entertainment Weekly wrote of Johansson’s “embracing, restful serenity”. The New York Times praised Johansson, aged 17 at the time of filming, for playing an older character.

In Peter Webber’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, which is based on the novel of the same name by Tracy Chevalier, Johansson played Griet, a young 17th-century servant in the household of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (played by Colin Firth). Webber interviewed 150 actors before casting Johansson. Johansson found the character moving, but did not read the novel, as she thought it was better to approach the story with a fresh start. Girl with a Pearl Earring received positive reviews and was profitable. In his review for The New Yorker, Anthony Lane thought that her presence kept the film “alive”, writing, “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 of Entertainment Weekly noted her “nearly silent performance”, remarking, “The interplay on her face of fear, ignorance, curiosity, and sex is intensely dramatic.” She was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress for both films in 2003, winning the former for Lost in Translation.

In Variety‘s opinion, Johansson’s roles in Lost in Translation and Girl with a Pearl Earring established her as among the most versatile actresses of her generation. Johansson had five releases in 2004, three of which—the teen heist film The Perfect Score, the drama A Love Song for Bobby Long, and the drama A Good Woman—were critical and commercial failures. Co-starring with John Travolta, Johansson played a discontented and suspicious teenager in A Love Song for Bobby Long, which is based on the novel Off Magazine Street by Ronald Everett Capps. David Rooney of Variety wrote that Johansson’s and Travolta’s performances rescued the film. Johansson earned a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama nomination for the film.

In her fourth release in 2004, the live-action animated comedy The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, Johansson voiced Princess Mindy, the daughter of King Neptune. She agreed to the project because of her love for cartoons and The Ren & Stimpy Show. The film was her most commercially successful release that year. She followed it with In Good Company, a comedy-drama in which she complicates the life of her father when she dates his much younger boss. Reviews of the film were generally positive, describing it as “witty and charming”. Roger Ebert was impressed with Johansson’s portrayal, writing that she “continues to employ the gravitational pull of quiet fascination”. She would then reprise her role as Mindy in the video game adaptation of the film.

2005–2009: Films with Woody Allen

Johansson played Nola, an aspiring actress who begins an affair with a married man (played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) in Woody Allen’s drama Match Point in 2005. After replacing Kate Winslet with Johansson for the role, Allen changed the character’s nationality from British to American. An admirer of Allen’s films, Johansson liked the idea of working with him, but felt nervous her first day on the set. The New York Times was impressed with the performances of Johansson and Rhys Meyers, and Mick LaSalle, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, stated that Johansson “is a powerhouse from the word go”, with a performance that “borders on astonishing”. The film, a box office success, earned Johansson nominations for the Golden Globe and the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress. Also that year, Johansson underwent a tonsillectomy, after which she starred with Ewan McGregor in Michael Bay’s science fiction film The Island, in dual roles as Sarah Jordan and her clone, Jordan Two Delta. Johansson found her filming schedule exhausting: she had to shoot for 14 hours a day, and she hit her head and injured herself. The film received mixed reviews and grossed $163 million against a $126 million budget.

Two of Johansson’s films in 2006 explored the world of stage magicians, both opposite Hugh Jackman. Allen cast her opposite Jackman and himself in the film Scoop (2006), in which she played a journalism student. The film was a modest worldwide box office success, but polarized critics. Ebert was critical of the film, but found Johansson “lovely as always”, and Mick LaSalle noted the freshness she brought to her part. She also appeared in Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia, a film noir shot in Los Angeles and Bulgaria. Johansson later said she was a fan of De Palma and had wanted to work with him on the film, but thought that she was unsuitable for the part. Anne Billson of The Daily Telegraph likewise found her miscast. However, CNN said that she “takes to the pulpy period atmosphere as if it were oxygen”.

Also in 2006, Johansson starred in the short film When the Deal Goes Down to accompany Bob Dylan’s song “When the Deal Goes Down…” from the album Modern Times. Johansson had a supporting role of assistant and lover of Jackman’s character, an aristocratic magician, in Christopher Nolan’s mystery thriller The Prestige (2006). Nolan thought Johansson possessed “ambiguity” and “a shielded quality”. She was fascinated with Nolan’s directing methods and liked working with him. The film was a critical and box office success, recommended by the Los Angeles Times as “an adult, provocative piece of work”. Some critics were skeptical of her performance: Billson again judged her miscast, and Dan Jolin of Empire criticized her English accent.

Johansson’s sole release of 2007 was the critically panned comedy-drama The Nanny Diaries alongside Chris Evans and Laura Linney, in which she played a college graduate working as a nanny. Reviews of her performance were mixed; Variety wrote, ” essays an engaging heroine”, and The New Yorker criticized her for looking “merely confused” while “trying to give the material a plausible emotional center”. In 2008, Johansson starred, with Natalie Portman and Eric Bana, in The Other Boleyn Girl, which also earned mixed reviews. Promoting the film, Johansson and Portman appeared on the cover of W, discussing with the magazine the public’s reception of them. In Rolling Stone, Pete Travers criticized the film for ” in frustrating herks and jerks”, but thought that the duo were the only positive aspect of the production. Variety credited the cast as “almost flawless … at the top of its game”, citing “Johansson’s quieter Mary … as the emotional center”.

In her third collaboration with Woody Allen, the romantic comedy-drama Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), which was filmed in Spain, Johansson plays one of the love interests of Javier Bardem’s character alongside Penélope Cruz. The film was one of Allen’s most profitable and received favorable reviews. A reviewer in Variety described Johansson as “open and malleable” compared to the other actors. She also played the femme fatale Silken Floss in The Spirit, based on the newspaper comic strip of the same name by Will Eisner. It received poor reviews from critics, who deemed it melodramatic, unoriginal, and sexist. Johansson’s only role in 2009 was as Anna Marks, a yoga instructor, in the ensemble comedy-drama He’s Just Not That into You (2009). The film was released to tepid reviews, but was a box office success.

2010–2013: Marvel Cinematic Universe and stage roles

Johansson had aspired to appear on Broadway since childhood. She made her debut in a 2010 revival of Arthur Miller’s drama A View from the Bridge. Set in the 1950s, in an Italian-American neighborhood in New York, it tells the tragic tale of Eddie (played by Liev Schreiber), who has an inappropriate love for his wife’s orphaned niece, Catherine (played by Johansson). After some reservations about playing a teenage character, Johansson agreed to the play when a friend convinced her to take on the part. Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote of Johansson’s performance that she “melts into her character so thoroughly that her nimbus of celebrity disappears”. Variety‘s David Rooney was impressed with the play and Johansson in particular, describing her as the chief performer. She won the 2010 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play. Some critics and Broadway actors criticized the award committee’s decision to reward the work of mainstream Hollywood actors, including Johansson. In response, she said that she understood the frustration, but had worked hard for her accomplishments.

Johansson played Black Widow in Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2 (2010), a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Before she secured the role, she dyed her hair red to convince Favreau that she was right for the part, and undertook stunt and strength training to prepare for the role. Johansson said the character resonated with her, and she admired the superhero’s human traits. The film earned $623.9 million against its $200 million budget, and received generally positive reviews from critics, although reviewers criticized how her character was written. Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph and Matt Goldberg thought that she had little to do but look attractive. In 2011, Johansson played the role of Kelly, a zookeeper in the family film We Bought a Zoo alongside Matt Damon. The film got mainly favorable reviews, and Anne Billson praised Johansson for bringing depth to a rather uninteresting character. Johansson earned a Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie Actress: Drama nomination for her performance.

Johansson learned some Russian from a former teacher on the phone for her role as Black Widow in The Avengers (2012), another entry from the MCU. The film received mainly positive reviews and broke many box office records, becoming the third highest-grossing film both in the United States and worldwide. For her performance, she was nominated for two Teen Choice Awards and three People’s Choice Awards. Later that year, Johansson portrayed actress Janet Leigh in Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock, a behind-the-scenes drama about the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho. Roger Ebert wrote that Johansson did not look much like Leigh, but conveyed her spunk, intelligence, and sense of humor.

In January 2013, Johansson starred in a Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Rob Ashford. Set in the Mississippi Delta, it examines the relationships within the family of Big Daddy (played by Ciarán Hinds), primarily between his son Brick (played by Benjamin Walker) and Maggie (played by Johansson). Her performance received mixed reviews. Entertainment Weekly‘s Thom Geier wrote, “Scarlett Johansson brings a fierce fighting spirit” to her part, but Joe Dziemianowicz from Daily News called her performance “alarmingly one-note”. The 2013 Sundance Film Festival hosted the premiere of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut, Don Jon. In this romantic comedy-drama, she plays a woman perplexed by the pornography-addicted title character. Gordon-Levitt wrote the role for Johansson, who had previously admired his acting work. The film received positive reviews and Johansson’s performance was highlighted by critics. Claudia Puig of USA Today considered it to be one of her best performances.

In 2013, Johansson voiced the character Samantha, an intelligent computer operating system, in Spike Jonze’s film Her, replacing Samantha Morton in the role. The film premiered at the 8th Rome International Film Festival, where Johansson won Best Actress; she was also nominated for the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Supporting Actress. Johansson was intimidated by the role’s complexity, and found her recording sessions for the role challenging but liberating. Peter Travers believed Johansson’s voice in the film was “sweet, sexy, caring, manipulative, scary award-worthy”. Time magazine’s Richard Corliss called her performance “seductive and winning”, and Her was rated as one of the best films of 2013. She also won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress at the 40th Saturn Awards in 2014 for her performance. Johansson was cast in the role of an alien who preys on men in Scotland in Jonathan Glazer’s science fiction film Under the Skin (2013). The project, an adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel of the same name, took nine years to complete. For the role, she learned to drive a van and speak in an English accent. Johansson improvised conversations with non-professional actors on the street, who did not know they were being filmed. It was released to generally positive reviews, with particular praise for Johansson. Erin Whitney, writing for The Huffington Post, considered it to be her finest performance to that point, and noted that it was her first fully nude role. Author Maureen Foster wrote, “How much depth, breadth, and range Johansson mines from her character’s very limited allowance of emotional response is a testament to her acting prowess that is, as the film goes on, increasingly stunning.”  It earned Johansson a BIFA Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a British Independent Film nomination.

2014–present: Action and superhero films

Continuing her work in the MCU, Johansson reprised her role as Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014). In the film, she joins forces with Captain America (Chris Evans) and Falcon (Anthony Mackie) to uncover a conspiracy within S.H.I.E.L.D., while facing a mysterious assassin known as the Winter Soldier. Johansson and Evans wrote their own dialogue for several scenes they had together. Johansson was attracted to her character’s way of doing her job, employing her feminine wiles and not her physical appeal. The film was a critical and commercial success, grossing over $714 million worldwide. Critic Odie Henderson saw “a genuine emotional shorthand at work, especially from Johansson, who is excellent here”. The role earned her a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination.