Emma Stone

Emily Jean Stone was born on November 6, 1988, in Scottsdale, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, to Jeffrey Charles Stone, the founder and CEO of a general-contracting company, and Krista Jean Stone, a homemaker. She has a younger brother, Spencer. Her paternal grandfather, Conrad Ostberg Sten, came from a Swedish family that anglicized their surname to Stone, and she also has German, English, Scottish, and Irish ancestry. She was raised Lutheran and attended Sequoya Elementary School and Cocopah Middle School before enrolling as a freshman at Xavier College Preparatory, an all-girl Catholic high school, which she left after one semester to pursue acting.

As an infant, Stone developed nodules and calluses on her vocal cords due to persistent crying from baby colic, which gave her a characteristically low, husky voice. She suffered from panic attacks and anxiety during childhood and underwent therapy, though she has credited participation in local theater with helping to alleviate those episodes. Stone wanted to act from the age of four, initially drawn to sketch comedy before shifting her focus to musical theater, for which she took vocal lessons for several years. Her stage debut came at age eleven in a production of The Wind in the Willows, in which she played Otter. During a two-year period of homeschooling, she appeared in sixteen productions at Phoenix's Valley Youth Theatre, including The Princess and the Pea, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and performed with the theater's improvisational comedy troupe.

To convince her parents to allow her to relocate to California, Stone prepared a PowerPoint presentation titled "Project Hollywood." In January 2004, she moved with her mother to an apartment in Los Angeles. That same year, she made her television debut as Laurie Partridge on the VH1 reality competition In Search of the New Partridge Family. When she registered with the Screen Actors Guild at age sixteen, the name Emily Stone was already taken, and she briefly used the name Riley Stone before settling on Emma, chosen in honor of Emma Bunton of the Spice Girls. After guest appearances on Medium in 2005 and Malcolm in the Middle in 2006, she appeared in Louis C.K.'s HBO series Lucky Louie. In April 2007, she played Violet Trimble in the Fox action drama Drive, which was canceled after seven episodes.

Stone made her feature film debut in Greg Mottola's comedy Superbad in 2007, opposite Michael Cera and Jonah Hill, earning the Young Hollywood Award for Exciting New Face. She followed that with The Rocker in 2008, for which she learned to play bass guitar, and The House Bunny the same year. Her first leading film role came with the comedy Easy A in 2010. She subsequently appeared in the romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love and the period drama The Help, both released in 2011, and gained broader recognition playing Gwen Stacy in Marc Webb's Spider-Man films between 2012 and 2014.

Stone earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of a recovering drug addict in the surrealist dark comedy Birdman in 2014. She went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing an aspiring actress in the romantic musical La La Land in 2016, the year she was also recognized as the world's highest-paid actress. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2017. That same year she portrayed tennis player Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes. She received a second Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for playing Abigail Hill in the absurdist period film The Favourite in 2018, her first collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos. She played the titular role in Cruella in 2021. Stone won a second Academy Award for Best Actress for Lanthimos's Poor Things in 2023, for which she also received a Best Picture nomination as a producer. Her subsequent collaborations with Lanthimos include the anthology film Kinds of Kindness in 2024 and the dark comedy Bugonia in 2025, the latter earning her additional nominations for both Best Actress and Best Picture and making her the first woman nominated as both a producer and actress in each of two different films. On television, she led the dark comedy miniseries Maniac in 2018 and The Curse in 2023. She and her husband, Dave McCary, founded the production company Fruit Tree in 2020.

On Broadway, Stone starred as Sally Bowles in a revival of the musical Cabaret, which ran from 2014 into 2015. Her accolades across her career include two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Volpi Cup.