The actress Scarlett Johansson was born in the Manhattan borough of New York City in 1984. She craved the spotlight since she was a child, often singing, dancing and performing for her family. But she also had serious ambition and talent. She was the kind of person who would practice crying in front of the mirror. In fact she was so aspirational that she quickly grew bored of the traditional child actor gigs like TV commercials and auditioned her way straight to the theater, making her off-Broadway debut in Sophistry along with a young Ethan Hawke (she wouldn’t make her actual Broadway debut until she was an adult when she starred in the Arthur Miller play A View from the Bridge in 2010 and the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2013).

Her first paid role was for a Late Night with Conan O’Brien sketch in 1994, but she would also make her film debut later that same year in Rob Reiner’s North, immediately feeling at home on a film set and understanding the job intuitively by her own account. When Robert Redford worked with her on the 1998 film The Horse Whisperer, he said she was “13 going on 30.” In fact she was so mature for her age that she lamented her teenage acting years for the lack of serious roles for teenagers in the nineties.

She eventually landed her first lead role in Manny & Lo (1996) playing the 11-year-old sister of a pregnant teen (Aleksa Palladino) and earning an Independent Spirit Award nomination in the process. And after working with directors like Robert Redford on The Horse Whisperer and the Coen Brothers on black-and-white noir drama The Man Who Wasn’t There, Johansson landed a breakout role playing a teenage outcast opposite Thora Birch in Terry Zwigoff’s indie comedy Ghost World (2001), an adaptation of the 1990s graphic novel by Daniel Clowes. Zwigoff thought that Johansson brought the right level of eccentricity to the role, and though the film gained little commercial attention it did gain a cult fan base among many young viewers.

Her transition to more adult roles took a big step with Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). Coppola shrewdly compared Johansson to a young Lauren Bacall, while the film itself was inspired by the Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart film The Big Sleep. It starred Bill Murray as a fading movie star who travels to Tokyo in the midst of a mid-life crisis and ends up meeting a college grad (Johansson) at his hotel. It was Johansson’s first big commercial hit and it put her on the map in Hollywood. And she was only 17 when she filmed it.

That same year Johansson was praised for her nearly silent but nonetheless emotion-filled performance in Peter Webber’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), and at this point Variety was praising the young actor’s versatility. A year later cartoon fan Johansson voiced King Neptune’s daughter Mindy in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004), which would be her highest-grossing film that entire decade.

After that Johansson played Dennis Quaid’s daughter in Paul Weitz’s romance In Good Company (2004), she played the magician’s assistant opposite Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale’s magicians in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) and she had three successful team-ups with Woody Allen for his films Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008).

One of the luckiest opportunities of her career came when she made her debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as super spy assassin Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow in Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2 (2010), a role for which Emily Blunt was initially cast before she dropped out, and a role that Johansson wanted so badly that she researched the comic book character, underwent physical training and even dyed her hair red to convince Jon Favreau to hire her. She would reprise the role and flesh out the character further in Marvel’s 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 Natasha Romanoff’s first solo film Black Widow (2021) which takes place after the events of Civil War and before the events of Infinity War while she is on the run from the law. Johansson gained a whole new nerdy fan base after starring in these films.

Johansson brought depth to what is considered a bland role in Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo (2011) opposite Matt Damon, she played Psycho actress Janet Leigh in the Alfred Hitchcock biopic Hitchcock (2012) opposite Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, she played the love interest to Joseph Gordon-Levitt in his film Don Jon (2013), and she would enter the world of sci-fi for multiple films playing an extraterrestrial lifeform intent on killing human men in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), providing the voice for artificial intelligence program Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) opposite Joaquin Phoenix, playing a woman who gains psychokinetic powers in Luc Besson’s Lucy (2014) and playing a cyborg supersoldier in Rupert Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell (2017).

Johansson also reunited with Iron Man 2 director Jon Favreau in 2014 to play a hostess in Chef, she returned to the world of the Coen Brothers to stretch her comedic muscles playing a movie star in Hail, Caesar! (2016) and she would continue accepting voice roles playing a python in Favreau’s The Jungle Book (2016), a punk rock-loving porcupine in Illumination’s Sing (2016) and a show dog in Wes Anderson’s stop-motion delight Isle of Dogs (2018). She would reprise her role as Ash the porcupine in the sequel Sing 2 (2021) and the short film Sing: Thriller (2024), and she would later re-team with Wes Anderson on the live-action films Asteroid City (2023) and The Phoenician Scheme (2025) as well, saying she enjoys the challenge and ironically the liberation of Wes Anderson’s direction.

Johansson would give one of her best dramatic performances playing Adam Driver’s wife in Noah Baumbach’s 2019 divorce drama Marriage Story (perhaps channeling something personal as she was going through a real divorce during filming). That same year she also played a secretly anti-Nazi German woman in Taika Waititi’s Nazi Germany-set satire Jojo Rabbit (2019). Both Marriage Story and Jojo Rabbit were nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars and Johansson would also receive two Oscar nominations for both of her roles in those films in the same year.

In 2024, Johansson produced and starred in Greg Berlanti’s period romance Fly Me to the Moon opposite love interest Channing Tatum (the first of Johansson’s films to be produced by her own company These Pictures, which she founded in 2022) and that same year she also voiced Elita-1 in Paramount Animation’s Transformers One. Both films fared poorly commercially, although Transformers One was fun and it received positive reviews.

Despite the latter having “Transformers” in the title, Steven Spielberg did not produce it, but Johansson would team up with Spielberg the following year to face off againt dinosaurs in Jurassic World Rebirth (as if Thanos and Megatron weren’t threatening enough). The seventh film in the Jurassic series was directed by Gareth Edwards, the man behind 2014’s Godzilla and 2016’s Rogue One, and was written by David Koepp, the man who wrote the original 1993 Jurassic Park (and who collaborated closely with Spielberg on Rebirth‘s story). In the movie Johansson plays a covert operative hired to hunt mutant dinosaurs on a remote island. The actor had wanted to be a part of the Jurassic series for years and even met with Spielberg himself to sell him on her inclusion in a Jurassic film, but it didn’t take much convincing for Gareth Edwards once he knew she was interested.

Projects Johansson has on the horizon include a crime drama called Paper Tiger which will reunite her with Adam Driver, and her directorial effort Eleanor the Great which stars June Squibb and which already premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. She also may be working on a Tower of Terror movie for Disney but that’s still in early development.

When you observe her film career and the roles she chooses, you can tell she is a serious performer who likes serious challenges, and that she doesn’t like being pigeonholed into one type of role. She said as much when she expressed her displeasure at being widely known as a sexy bombshell from a young age, although she is still flattered by the compliment and just like many actors will occasionally capitalize on that reputation, which also proves that she doesn’t take herself too seriously. She is obviously passionate about drama, but she is also clearly a fan of action films, science fiction, animation and you know she likes comedy (she not only made appearances on SNL and Robot Chicken but she made multiple appearances on SNL and Robot Chicken). In other words, she has an excellent career.