Scarlett Johansson | Biography, Movies, & Facts (2024)

Scarlett Johansson (born November 22, 1984, New York City, New York, U.S.) is an American actress and singer whose acting range earned her popular acclaim in a variety of genres, from period drama to thriller and action adventure.

Johansson, daughter of an architect and a producer, was raised in New York City. She and her twin brother, Hunter, were the youngest of four siblings. She developed an interest in acting at a young age, auditioning for commercials by age seven. Soon after, she enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and later attended the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan to further hone her craft. At age eight she appeared alongside Ethan Hawke in the Off-Broadway production Sophistry, and at nine she made her film debut in Rob Reiner’s North (1994). Johansson subsequently appeared in Just Cause (1995), but her first breakthrough came with Manny & Lo (1996), a coming-of-age film about orphaned sisters who run away. She next earned critical acclaim for her role as a teenager who has suffered a disfiguring accident in The Horse Whisperer (1998), and she gained further attention as cynical teen outcast Rebecca in Ghost World (2001).

Johansson came into her own playing more adult roles, notably that of the disillusioned Charlotte, a young woman bored with her life and her marriage who starts a complicated relationship with a middle-aged man (played by Bill Murray) in Lost in Translation (2003), and Griet, a housemaid who bewitches painter Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) in the historical drama Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003). In 2005 she appeared to critical acclaim in director Woody Allen’s Match Point, and she later starred in his films Scoop (2006) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Also in 2005 she costarred in her first big-budget action movie, The Island, alongside Ewan McGregor. Johansson continued to explore her acting range in the period drama The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), the romantic comedy He’s Just Not That into You (2009), and the heartwarming drama We Bought a Zoo (2011).

In 2010 she made her Broadway debut in A View from the Bridge and won a Tony Award for best actress. That same year she appeared in the action film Iron Man 2 as Natasha Romanoff, a secret agent otherwise known as the Black Widow, a role she went on to reprise in the superhero blockbusters The Avengers (2012), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Black Widow (2021). She switched gears completely at the end of 2012, portraying actress Janet Leigh in the biopic Hitchco*ck.

In 2013 Johansson returned to the Broadway stage in a revival production of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Later that year she starred as a woman dating a man who is addicted to p*rnography in the romantic comedy Don Jon and provided the voice of a sentient computer operating system in director Spike Jonze’s romance Her. She played a mysterious alien who drives around Glasgow and abducts men in Under the Skin (2013), a kindhearted restaurant hostess in Chef (2014), a woman who develops superpowers after a mind-expanding drug enters her system in Lucy (2014), and a starlet in the Coen brothers’ comedy Hail, Caesar! (2016). Johansson’s 2017 credits included Ghost in the Shell, in which she portrayed a cyborg woman who battles criminals, and Rough Night, a comedy about a bachelorette party. Two years later she played a mother harbouring a Jewish girl in the Nazi satire Jojo Rabbit and a woman undergoing a divorce in Marriage Story. Her performances earned Johansson her first Academy Award nominations; for the former film she received a nod for supporting actress, and the latter movie netted her a lead actress nomination.

In addition, Johansson lent her throaty voice to a number of characters, including a computer-animated version of the snake Kaa in a live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (2016) and an alternative-rock singing porcupine in the animated family film Sing (2016) and its sequel (2021). In 2018 she voiced an alluring canine in Wes Anderson’s animated feature Isle of Dogs.

Johansson also pursued opportunities aside from acting. After appearing on a charity album of star-studded song covers in 2006 and making a brief appearance singing backing vocals for the Jesus and Mary Chain at the 2007 Coachella music festival, she released her first album, a collection of Tom Waits covers called Anywhere I Lay My Head, in 2008. The following year she released an album of duets with Pete Yorn, called Break Up. The pair released the EP Apart in 2018.