Scarlett Johansson

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, and a grandson of Ejner Johansson, an art historian, screenwriter, and film director. Her mother, Melanie Sloan, has worked as a producer. Johansson has an older sister named Vanessa, who is also an actress, an older brother named Adrian, a twin brother named Hunter, and an older half-brother named Christian from her father's first marriage. She holds dual American and Danish citizenship. Her family has Jewish roots, with ancestors who fled Poland and Russia under the surname Schlamberg, and Johansson has identified herself as Jewish. Her parents divorced when she was thirteen. She was particularly close to her maternal grandmother, Dorothy Sloan, a bookkeeper and schoolteacher, whom she considered her best friend.

Johansson attended PS 41 in Greenwich Village and later studied at the Professional Children's School, a private institution for aspiring child actors in Manhattan. From an early age she was drawn to musical theater and took tap dance lessons, with her parents supporting her career ambitions. She enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and auditioned for commercials before shifting her focus to film and theater. Her first stage appearance came in the off-Broadway play Sophistry, alongside Ethan Hawke, in which she had two lines.

At age nine, Johansson landed a paid role as a sketch character on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. She made her film debut as John Ritter's daughter in the fantasy comedy North in 1994. Subsequent early roles included parts in Just Cause (1995) and If Lucy Fell (1996). Her first leading film role came in Manny & Lo (1996), for which she earned a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Female. She attracted wider attention with The Horse Whisperer (1998), directed by and co-starring Robert Redford, and later appeared in the Coen brothers' neo-noir film The Man Who Wasn't There (2001). Her breakthrough came with Terry Zwigoff's black comedy Ghost World (2001), an adaptation of Daniel Clowes' graphic novel.

Johansson's transition to adult roles began in 2003 with Lost in Translation, for which she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress. That same year she appeared in Girl with a Pearl Earring, playing a 17th-century servant. She subsequently starred in A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004), in which she played a troubled teenager, and Match Point (2005), in which she played a struggling actress. Match Point marked her first collaboration with director Woody Allen, who later directed her in Scoop (2006) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Other work during this period included The Prestige (2006) and two albums, Anywhere I Lay My Head (2008) and Break Up (2009), both of which charted on the Billboard 200.

In 2010, Johansson made her Broadway debut in a revival of A View from the Bridge, earning the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play as well as a Theatre World Award that same year. She returned to Broadway for a second production, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with her stage work spanning from 2010 to 2013. Also in 2010, she began portraying Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, first appearing in Iron Man 2. She reprised the role across eight films, culminating in the solo feature Black Widow in 2021. During this period she also starred in the science fiction films Her (2013), Under the Skin (2013), and Lucy (2014).

At the 2020 Academy Awards, Johansson received two simultaneous nominations — Best Actress for her role as an actress going through a divorce in the drama Marriage Story (2019), and Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of a single mother in Nazi Germany in the satire Jojo Rabbit (2019), making her one of the few performers to achieve this distinction. She was named the world's highest-paid actress in both 2018 and 2019 and has appeared multiple times on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2021 and 2025. The cumulative worldwide gross of films in which she has had a leading role exceeds $15.4 billion, placing her second among the highest-grossing actors in history.

Johansson was previously married to actor Ryan Reynolds and later to businessman Romain Dauriac, with whom she has one child. Since 2020 she has been married to comedian Colin Jost, with whom she has a second child. On a 2017 episode of PBS's Finding Your Roots, she learned that her maternal great-grandfather's brother and extended family perished in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.