Scarlett Johansson: Snapshot

Scarlett Johansson: Video

Scarlett Johansson: Five Fun Facts

1. Scarlett Johansson has a twin brother named Hunter. They might have been born on the same day, but she still has "older sister" status: she beat him out of the womb by three minutes.
2. In 1998, a 13-year-old Scarlett Johansson lost the lead role in The Parent Trap to Lindsay Lohan.
3. Scarlett Johansson had a Japanese fighting fish named Cassius. When the fish died in 2005 after a fish-sitting friend forgot to change his water, Johansson buried him in the garden at L.A,'s Chateau Marmont. (She was living at the hotel at the time.)
4. Known for being mature beyond her years, Scarlett Johansson is really a kid at heart. She celebrated her 20th birthday at Disneyland, and her favorite movie is Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
5. Scarlett Johansson's nude bottom (from the February 2006 Vanity Fair cover with an also nude Keira Knightley) was stenciled on 100 cookies nibbled by guests at the magazine's annual Oscar Party.

Scarlett Johansson: Biography

1992-1993

Acting Too Commercial

At age 7, Johansson starts auditioning for commercials and becomes disinterested. "It was like a cattle call," she tells Allure in 2005. "[My mom and I] decided I'd just go out for film. I didn't want to promote Wonder Bread." After taking weekend acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Manhattan, an 8-year-old Johansson appears opposite Ethan Hawke in an off-Broadway production of Sophistry. "I had two lines," she tells Allure.

1994-1996

Fate Plays a Hand

In Rob Reiner's North, Johansson, 9, makes her film debut as John Ritter's daughter. "I remember going onto the set of my first film and, for some reason, I just knew what to do, instinctively. It was like, I don't know...fate," she tells New York Magazine in 2004. As fate has it, an 11-year-old Johansson draws notice – and an Independent Spirit Award nod – for her performance as one of two orphaned sisters who run away from a foster home in Manny & Lo.

1998

May 15

Stepping Up

Johansson's standout performance as a young teenager who loses her leg in a horse-riding accident in The Horse Whisperer puts her on the map. Her director and costar Robert Redford famously calls her "13 going on 30." She tells Esquire in 2005, "That film changed things for me in a lot of ways. I went through this realization that acting, at its heart, is the ability to manipulate your own emotions."

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