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Scarlett Johansson
Scarlett Johansson is among the most celebrated young
actresses working in film today, not only because of her classical beauty
and endearing charm, but also because of her ability to exude a maturity
beyond her years. After a childhood spent studying and practicing the
craft of acting, she broke into the spotlight with her appearance opposite
the veteran actor Bill Murray in the award-winning film Lost in
Translation (2003), about two alienated Americans who share a brief,
tender relationship in a foreign city. Johansson gave another highly
acclaimed performance later that same year as a young servant who inspires
one of the painter Johannes Vermeer’s masterpieces,
in Girl with a Pearl Earring. In the wake of those successes, Johansson
has found herself much in demand. Reviewing her performance in A Love Song
for Bobby Longone of four movies in which she appeared in 2004the New York
Daily News (December 29, 2004) film critic Jack Mathews wrote,
“Johansson has to be the oldest 20-year-old leading
lady since the studio days. The camera loves her, but she is lighted with
an intelligence and confidence that comes from the inside.”
In a review of Lost in Translation for Newsweek (September 15, 2003),
David Ansen wrote that Johansson has “always
radiated a throaty gravity and projected a blunt honesty on screen. Though
the native New Yorker has been performing since . . . the age of 8, the
camera never catches her Acting. She gives the impression of having
arrived fully formed. She just is--like a noun that doesn't need an
adjective.”
Of Polish and Danish descent, Scarlett Johansson was
born on November 22, 1984 in New York City. She and her twin brother,
Hunter, are the youngest of Karsten and Melanie Johansson’s
four children. According to the Internet Movie Database, her parents
separated when she was 13 and later divorced. A grandchild of the Danish
screenwriter and documentary filmmaker Ejner Johansson, Scarlett was
surrounded by creative people during her youth and expressed an interest
in acting as early as age three. After she began taking classes at the
legendary Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute for Young People, in Los
Angeles, California, Johansson was brought to auditions by her mother.
(Melanie Johansson later produced A Love Song for Bobby Long and now
serves as her daughter's manager.) At age eight Johansson made her stage
debut, opposite Ethan Hawke in an Off-Broadway production of the play
Sophistry. She made her film debut when she was nine, with an appearance
in North (1994), a Rob Reinerdirected comedy that critics panned. She next
secured supporting parts in the movies Just Cause (1995), a thriller
starring Sean Connery, and If Lucy Fell (1996), a romantic comedy
featuring Sarah Jessica Parker and Ben Stiller.
As one of two orphaned, vagabond sisters in Manny and Lo
(1996), Johansson received appreciative notices and a nomination for an
Independent Spirit Award. (According to the Internet Movie Database,
Johansson's parents, her brother, Hunter, and her sister Vanessa had small
parts in the movie.) In a prescient review for the San Francisco Chronicle
(August 9, 1996), Mick LaSalle wrote, “Finding
poised child actors is difficult enough, but Johansson's peaceful aura,
which takes in everything with equanimity, is something special. If she
can get through puberty with that aura undisturbed, she could become an
important actress.” In 1997 Johansson had brief
roles in Fall and Home Alone 3. Her career received a big boost when she
was tapped by the renowned actor and director Robert Redford to co-star in
his movie The Horse Whisperer (1998). In that film Johansson played Grace,
the daughter of two New York professionals (Kristin Scott Thomas and Sam
Neill). After Grace and her horse, Pilgrim, are severely injured in a
riding accident, Grace’s mother seeks out a man
from Montana (Redford) who uses traditional remedies to cure horsesas well
as the traumatized psyches of those who, like Grace, are afraid to ride
again. Johansson told Chris Jones for Esquire (February 2005) that The
Horse Whisperer “changed things for me in a lot of
ways. Certainly as an actor. I went through this realization that acting,
at its heart, is the ability to manipulate your own emotions. . . . It's
weird to have that sort of learning process documented.”
Although The Horse Whisperer received mixed reviews, it proved to be a
success at the box office, earning more than $75 million. A number of
critics singled out Johansson’s portrayal as the
best part of the movie. Peter Howell, in the Toronto Star (May 15, 1998),
wrote, “The standout performance is by Scarlett
Johansson. . . . [The role of Grace] demands the authenticity of emotion
that Johansson brings to it.” For her work in The
Horse Whisperer, Johansson was nominated for an award for most promising
actress by the Chicago Film Critics Association.
In 2001 Johansson found herself on the cusp of stardom.
She earned critical praise for her turns as an underage piano-playing
seductress in Ethan and Joel Coen's black-and-white film The Man Who
Wasn't There and as a young girl whose family flees 1950s-era
Communist-ruled Hungary for the United States in An American Rhapsody. In
that same year Johansson co-starred in the director Terry Zwigoff's film
Ghost World, which was based on a novel-length comic book by Daniel
Clowes. Johansson played Rebecca, who, along with her best friend, Enid
(Thora Birch), struggles with life after their recent high-school
graduations. Though Ghost World did not attract many theatergoers, it won
plaudits from critics. In the New York Times (July 20, 2001), A. O. Scott
praised Ghost World's depiction of “teenage
eccentricity” and its “incisive
satire of the boredom and conformity that rule our thrill-seeking,
individualistic land.” B. Ruby Rich wrote for the
Nation (September 310, 2001), “Almost without
exception, Ghost World hits its target with a bull's-eye. It renders,
nearly pitch-perfect, the tone of teenage girls' friendshipthe
overidentification and competition, the combined desire for and horror of
boys/men, the simultaneous re-invention and rejection of femininity and
the torment of succumbing to minimum-wage conformity while desperately
trying to figure a way out.”
Johansson graduated from the Professional Children’s
School in New York City in 2002. She applied to New York University’s
Tisch School of the Arts for the fall 2003 semester, but was rejected.
That setback led her to focus on her career, which took off shortly
thereafter, when Lost in Translation, the director Sophia Coppola's
sophomore effort, made Johansson a bona fide movie star. In the film
Johansson played Charlotte, a young American woman who has accompanied her
photographer husband to Tokyo, Japan. Neglected by her husband, who is
immersed in his work, Charlotte wanders the streets of Tokyo alone, unable
to sleep and feeling isolated and uncomfortable in her own skin. At the
bar of the hotel in which she and her husband are staying, she meets Bob
(Bill Murray), an aging American movie actor whose career is in the
doldrums and who has come to Tokyo to shoot a lucrative whiskey
commercial. Like Charlotte, Bob is disenchanted with his life and unsure
of how to move forward. The bond that Charlotte and Bob form becomes the
central focus of the movie, which impressed audiences and critics alike.
Robert W. Butler wrote for the Kansas City Star (September 26, 2003),
“Johansson, who has quietly snuck up on moviegoers
with a series of wonderful performances in little films (American
Rhapsody, Ghost World, The Man Who Wasn't There), plays Charlotte with an
enchanting blend of wistfulness and gravity. Her ability to suggest
insights beyond her years is remarkable. Moreover, Johansson has been
blessed with a face that at first seems average and becomes more
enchanting as you watch her. By the end of this film you'll be in love
with her, too.” Peter Travers concurred, writing in
his review for Rolling Stone (September 8, 2003) that Johansson
“has matured into an actress of smashing loveliness
and subtle grace.” In his Newsweek review, David
Ansen, too, proclaimed the young actress's virtues: “In
Coppola's Lost in Translation, Johansson finally takes center stage and
becomes an adult. . . . [She] hold[s] her own with Bill Murray at his most
inspired. . . . Their brief, wondrous encounter is the soul of this
subtle, funny, melancholy film.” Lost in
Translation grossed more than $40 million in box-office receipts, a
remarkable total for a small-budget film. Both the movie itself and the
individual actors were nominated for a slew of honors, including several
Academy Awards. Johansson won a British Academy of Film and Television
Arts award for best actress and took home the same prize at the Venice
Film Festival. She was also nominated for best-actress awards by the
Chicago Film Critics Association, the Broadcast Film Critics Association,
and the Golden Globes.
Johansson next starred as the title character and
fictional muse of the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (Colin
Firth) in Girl with a Pearl Earring. In the film, based on the same-titled
novel by Tracy Chevalier, Johansson played Griet, an innocent yet wise
servant girl who becomes the painter's assistant after Vermeer realizes
that she has a rare artistic sensibility. Vermeer immortalizes Griet by
making her the subject of one of his masterpieces--the portrait A Girl
with a Pearl Earring. The remarkable expression on the sitter's face, and
the knowledge that Vermeer has painted an image of their illiterate maid,
throws Vermeer's wife into a jealous rage, and she banishes Griet from the
house. The emotional and physical attraction that Vermeer and Griet
obviously feel toward each other is never consummated. Many critics found
fault with the film--in Entertainment Weekly (December 12, 2003), for
example, Owen Gleiberman complained that “the
movie's soap opera of jealousy and forbidden obsession is standard
middlebrow fare”--but they were nearly unanimous in
their praise for Johansson’s performance. In the
Chicago Tribune (December 26, 2003), Michael Wilmington wrote,
“Johansson gives the second of two remarkable 2003
film performances. . . . As Griet, who barely says a word, Johansson
creates both the portrait's image and a resilient but deeply sensitive
girl, a social victim who becomes a sublime icon.”
In the San Francisco Chronicle (December 26, 2003), Ruthe Stein wrote that
Johansson plays Griet “with a palpable feeling for
what it's like to be on the brink of sexual awakening‘ripe
as a plum,’ in the words of Vermeer's lecherous art
dealer. Johansson . . . shows a notable lack of vanity, going through Girl
with no apparent makeup and her hair covered by a scarf. She bears a
startling resemblance to the [real] painting's anonymous sitter.”
After the release of Girl with a Pearl Earring, critics
began to suggest that Johansson had built a niche for herself in films as
a young muse for older men. In interviews Johansson suggested that she had
a natural connection to older men and that she could not imagine herself
dating anyone younger than 30. “Men have no aid to
tell them that they’re getting older,”
she noted in an interview with Virginia Hefferman for the New York Times
(September 7, 2003). “They just see their bodies
decaying. A young, fertile, fruitful woman can help you across that
bridge.” However, in her interview with Chris
Jones, Johansson playfully lamented those earlier comments, saying,
“It's horrible. I don't know why young men won't
come up to me anymore. Seriously. . . . Now I'm stuck with the geezers.”
In A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004), Johansson again
played something of a muse, this time to an alcoholic, down-on-his-luck
literature professor (John Travolta). When Johansson, as Pursy, arrives in
New Orleans to claim her childhood home, which she has inherited from her
estranged mother (one of the professor's former lovers), she finds the
house dilapidated and occupied by ex-professor Long and his protege and
former teaching assistant (Gabriel Macht), both of whom are drowning their
shared tragic past in alcohol. After Pursy insists on moving into the
house with them, their lives are altered in unexpected ways. Johansson’s
performance, which brought her another Golden Globe nomination for best
actress, was seen as one of the film's few saving graces. In the Los
Angeles Times (December 29, 2004), Carina Chocano wrote that Johansson
“brings to life the kind of teen character we
rarely see on screen. She's blunt without being sarcastic, smart without
being smart-alecky and confident in her own insecurity. Hovering on the
edge of childhood, she (quite realistically) clings to her youth,
reminding an unforgivably crass Bobby early on that, at 18, she's still
just a kid. Johansson makes this look like a revelation.”
In the New York Daily News (December 29, 2004), Jack Mathews wrote,
“The sole asset of Bobby Long is Johansson.
Blossoming before our very eyes, she gives Pursy the combination of hope
and determination that makes her journey worthwhile.”
Johansson next appeared alongside Dennis Quaid and
Topher Grace in the comedic drama In Good Company (2004). In that motion
picture she was cast as Alex, who feels caught between her loyalty to her
good-natured father, Dan, and her romantic attraction for his new boss,
Carter, who is half her father’s age.
“Johansson is marvelous,”
Richard Schickel wrote in his review of In Good Company for Time (January
17, 2005). “Her Alex will have her way with Dan and
with Carter, but she never surrenders her sweetness, her young woman’s
hesitancies and insecurities.” Johansson's other
big-screen appearances include My Brother the Pig (1999), Eight Legged
Freaks (2002), The Perfect Score (2004), and A Good Woman (2004). She has
roles in three movies scheduled for release in 2005: “The
Island,” a science-fiction thriller;
“The Black Dahlia,” a
thriller based on a novel by James Ellroy; and a comedy written and
directed by Woody Allen. Johansson is also slated to act opposite Tom
Cruise in “Mission: Impossible III,”
due out in 2006. Regarding the varied roles she has chosen to play,
Johansson told Chris Jones, “Different projects
bring different things to you. I mean, I don't have a plan for myself, and
I don't want people to see me in any particular way.”
Johansson, who has worked steadily as an actress since
she was 12, told Jones, “I have a hard time taking
time off. Whenever I'm taking time off, all I'm thinking about is working.
I feel like right now I have a one-in-a-million chance. There are so many
great actors who are unemployed, and seeing them makes you wonder why
everything's happening for you. It's luck. I'm just lucky. But to have
this strange breakout, it's just a dream. It really is.”
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