Getting to Know: Scarlett Johansson

What a difference a day makes. On Monday 13 January 2020, Scarlett Johansson went from being an actress with no Oscar nominations to one with two. In the latest entry in Cinema Paradiso's series about the stars who have illuminated the silver screen, we trace the career of a child star who became the world's highest-paid actress.

The concept of screen stardom has changed a good deal in the blockbuster era. Under the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, a film's fate was bound up in the appeal and performance of its leads. Stars sold movies. But, in an age of franchises and special effects, the actors aren't always the chief selling point. There are exceptions, however, and Scarlett Johansson is clearly one of them. The Marvel brand undoubtedly explains the success of the pictures in which she has played Black Widow. Yet, no matter what role she takes, Johansson exudes an old-fashioned aura that suggests she would have been a star in any decade over the last 125 years.

The Twin Who Wanted to Be Judy Garland

On 22 November 1984, twins Scarlett and Hunter were born in Manhattan to Karsten Johansson and his wife, Melanie. An architect who hailed from Copenhagen, Karsten was the grandson of the Danish art historian and documentarist Ejner Johansson. From an early age, Scarlett delighted in performing the songs she had heard on videos of old Judy Garland and Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals and took tap dancing lessons in the hope of being cast in commercials. Loathing the auditioning process, however, she enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and, in 1993, was cast in a two-line role opposite Ethan Hawke in the Off-Broadway production of Jonathan Marc Sherman's play, Sophistry.

Still only nine, Scarlett juggled attending the Professional Children's School with making her screen debut as John Ritter's daughter in Rob Reiner's comic fantasy, North (1994). Her parents were even more famous in Arne Glimcher's Just Cause (1995), as Sean Connery was cast alongside Kate Capshaw as a Harvard law professor re-opening an old case. She was next seen as Sarah Jessica Parker's neighbour in Eric Schaeffer's If Lucy Fell and had reached the grand old age of 11 when she won her first gong, the Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Female in Lisa Krueger's Manny & Lo (both 1996), in which she played the younger sister of pregnant teenage runaway, Aleksa Palladino.

Hunter also had a part in this poignant drama. But, even though their older sister Vanessa had also become an actress, it quickly became clear who was the star of the family. Things at home were far from cosy, however, as Karsten and Melanie divorced when Scarlett was 13 and she spent much time with her teacher grandmother, Dorothy Sloan. Yet she continued to act, as a small girl in Eric Schaeffer's Fall and as Alex D. Linz's older sister in Raja Gosnell's Home Alone 3 (both 1997).

Her big break came, however, when Robert Redford cast her in his 1998 adaptation of Nicholas Evans's bestseller, The Horse Whisperer. Indeed, Redford was so impressed by her performance as Grace MacLean, the teenager whose riding injury prompts parents Annie (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Robert (Sam Neill) to hire equine trainer Tom Booker (Redford) that the actor-director claimed she had the mentality and talent of someone '13 going on 30'. Another animal loomed large in Erik Fleming's My Brother the Pig (1999), although less was required of Johansson in this juvenile road movie, in which her irksome sibling is accidentally transformed by some magic stones belonging to Mexican nanny Eva Mendes.

Major film-makers had started to notice Johansson, however, and Joel and Ethan Coen hired her to play Rachel 'Birdy' Abundas, the adolescent pianist who intrigues Santa Rosa barber Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) in The Man Who Wasn't There. She also appeared as Suzanne, the rebellious 15 year-old daughter of Hungarian émigrés Nastassja Kinski and Tony Goldwyn, who returns to Communist Budapest to discover her roots in director Éva Gardos's autobiographical 1950s drama, An American Rhapsody (both 2001).

More significantly, Terry Zwigoff paired Johansson with Thora Birch as Rebecca and Enid, the misfit schoolgirls who fall out over the latter's friendship with the lovelorn Seymour (Steve Buscemi) in his take on Daniel Clowse's cult comic-book, Ghost World (2001). Having failed to land a place at New York University's prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, Johansson decided to devote herself to acting and signed up to play Ashley Parker, one of the residents of Prosperity, Arizona facing some rampaging arachnids in Ellory Elkayem's Eight Legged Freaks (2002). But everything would change with her next picture.

Settling Into Stardom

Johansson was still a teenager when Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) made her a star. Playing a neglected wife who befriends bored actor Bill Murray during a short stay in Tokyo, she managed to seem fresh and vulnerable, as Coppola had envisaged her as a latterday Lauren Bacall to the world-weary Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). The whispered exchange in the closing moments caught the popular imagination, but Johansson's pink-wigged karaoke rendition of The Pretenders hit 'Brass in Pocket' was just as iconic. She was more demure in her second standout picture of 2003, however, as she saw off competition from 150 other young actresses to play Griet, the 17th-century serving maid in the household of Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) in Peter Webber's visually and atmospherically assured adaptation of Tracy Chevalier's bestseller, Girl With a Pearl Earring.

In addition to a dual Golden Globe nomination, Johansson also won the BAFTA for Best Actress for Lost in Translation and threw herself into a run of five films in 2004. Reverting to teen type, she joined Erika Christensen and Chris Evans in a bid to break into an exam centre to steal the S.A.T. paper that will define their academic futures in Brian Robbins's The Perfect Score, while she drove doting dad Dennis Quaid to distraction by falling for Topher Grace, the whizz kid ad exec who has just been promoted over him, in Paul Weisz's In Good Company. She found herself in the middle of a romantic muddle in Mike Barker's A Good Woman, which reworked Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan in having Meg (Johansson) fret about the attentions of Lord Darlington (Stephen Campbell Moore) as rumours start to spread that her husband, Robert (Mark Umbers) is competing with Tuppy (Tom Wilkinson) for the affections of Mrs Erlynne (Helen Hunt).

Changing tack, Johansson voiced Princess Mindy in Stephen Hillenberg and Mark Osborne's The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and went on to reprise the role of King Neptune's daughter in the spin-off video game. She also earned another Golden Globe nomination for her work as a suspicious teenager opposite John Travolta in A Love Song For Bobby Long, Shainee Gabel's adaptation of Ronald Everett Capps's novel, Off Magazine Street. Despite the acclaim, however, the film proved a commercial disappointment and Johansson was left to question her role choices while she recovered from a tonsillectomy in 2005. The year also saw her co-star with Ewan McGregor in Michael Bay's sci-fi thriller, The Island, in which Johansson doubles up as Sarah Jordan and her clone, Jordan Two Delta, in order to make a daring escape from a high-security experimental facility.

Scarlett and Controversy

She returned to a more recognisable world in Woody Allen's Match Point, which saw her replace an indisposed Kate Winslet to play actress Nola Rice, who threatens to come between recently retired Irish tennis star Chris Wilson (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and his wealthy wife, Chloe (Emily Mortimer). Johansson would work with the veteran director again on Scoop (2006) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). The films respectively featured Johansson as Sondra Pransky, a journalism student on the trail of a London serial killer, and Cristina, a confused nonconformist whose Catalan holiday with Vicky (Rebecca Hall) takes an unexpected twist when they are befriended by bohemian artist Juan Antonio Gonzalo (Javier Bardem) and his short-fused ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz). However, Johansson's vocal support of Allen in the wake of accusations by adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow have led some to question Johansson's judgement.

A further furore would later erupt when she accepted the part of Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell, director Rupert Sander's 2017 live-action take on the Masamune Shirow manga that had already inspired Mamoru Oshii's 1995 anime classic of the same name.

Sander was accused of whitewashing, as cyborg Kusanagi holds memories of her time as a Japanese woman. But, while Johansson was criticised, she explained that she had wanted to essay an empowered female protagonist and would never dream of playing somebody of another race. While this fuss eventually died down, Johansson struggled to justify her decision to accept the role of a transgender gangster and massage parlour owner Dante 'Tex' Gill in Soo Lyu's proposed biopic, Rub & Tug, when the community complained that a cisgender woman should never be cast as a trans man. But times had changed since Hilary Swank won an Oscar for playing Brandon Teena in Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry (1999) and Johansson apologised for failing to understand the situation and withdrew from a project that remains in limbo.

Controversy has a habit of following Johansson around, however. The detractors made themselves heard when she released an album of Tom Waits covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head, in 2008 and when she teamed with Pete Yorn on Break Up, a collection of duets inspired by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot's Bonnie and Clyde (1968). Even when she formed a band called The Singles with Este Haim, Holly Miranda, Kendra Morris and Julia Haltigan, it was Johansson who took any flak. Similarly, when she made her Broadway debut in a 2010 revival of Arthur Miller's drama A View From the Bridge, there was uproar that a pampered Hollywood starlet should win the Tony for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play. Indeed, there was a sense of quiet satisfaction in some quarters when Johansson's efforts in a 2013 reworking of Tennesse Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof fell short of expectations.

Learning From the Odd Slip

Back in 2006, the critics were prepared to cut Johansson a bit more slack when Brian De Palma failed to deliver with The Black Dahlia, a fictionalised variation on an infamous murder case that had gripped postwar Hollywood. Johansson played Kay Lake, the girlfriend of cop Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), who is investigating the gruesome killing of B-Hive actress Ann Short (Mia Kirshner) with partner Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett). However, Johansson later conceded that she might have been miscast and felt more at home in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (both 2006), as Olivia Winscombe, the assistant to and lover of Robert Anger (Hugh Jackman), the magician in reckless competition in Victorian London with Alfred Borden (Christian Bale).

As the press speculated about her relationship with Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, Johansson lightened her workload in 2007 by acting solely in The Nanny Diaries, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's adaptation of Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's novel about Annie Braddock, who is mistaken for a nanny by stressed New York mother, Alexandra X (Laura Linney) and her husband, Stan (Paul Giamatti), and promptly falls for one of the well-heeled couple's neighbours, whom she has nicknamed 'Harvard Hottie' (Chris Evans). If she breezed through this crowdpleaser, Johansson had to rise to the challenge of playing Mary Boleyn, the sister of Anne (Natalie Portman) and mistress of Henry VIII (Eric Bana) in Justin Chadwick's take on the 2001 Philippa Gregory bestseller, The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), which had already been more than capably adapted for the BBC by Philippa Lowthorpe in 2003, with Natasha McElhone, Jodhi May and Jared Harris in the leading roles.

Johansson saw out the year in Frank Miller's misjudged adaptation of Will Eisner's newspaper strip, The Spirit, which centres on the exploits of Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht), a cop-turned-masked avenger who guards the denizens of Central City from such ne'er-do-wells as Sand Saref (Eva Mendes), The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) and femme fatale Silken Floss (Johansson). The picture has acquired a cult following, unlike Ken Kwapis's romcom He's Just Not That Into You (2009), a retooling of the self-help book penned by Sex and the City scribes Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo that cast Johansson as yoga instructor Anna Marks in an all-star ensemble that also includes Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly, Ben Affleck and Bradley Cooper. But Johansson could afford the occasional misstep, as she was about to sign up for a role that would boost both her profile and her bank balance.

The Marvellous Ms Johansson

Emily Blunt's schedule was responsible for Johansson's entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She had lobbied to play Black Widow in Jon Favreau's Iron Man 2, but he hadn't been convinced that she was right for the role. But, when Blunt was forced to drop out because she was committed to team with Jack Black in Ron Letterman's Gulliver's Travels (both 2010), Favreau had to reverse his decision and Johansson has made the part of Natasha Romanoff her own.

Indeed, it's hard to imagine anyone else as the Red Room-trained spy after Johansson's scene-stealing turns in Joss Whedon's Avengers Assemble (2012) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Anthony and Joe Russo's Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's Captain Marvel (2019). Rumours are that Johansson will step down after Cate Shortland's Black Widow, which is due in cinemas this summer. But fans will have to keep their fingers crossed, as will Marvel and Disney, as these superhero flicks have contributed significantly to Johansson's pictures amassing $14.3 billion worldwide to the autumn of 2019.

While four entries in the franchise are in the all-time box-office Top 10 - with Avengers: Endgame currently occupying the No.1 slot - Johansson has continued to make non-blockbusters. She may have lost out to Rooney Mara for the role of Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher's version of Stieg Larsson's bestseller, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), but she has landed an impressively diverse array of roles in mainstream, arthouse and niche pictures.

In Cameron Crowe's fact-based We Bought a Zoo (2011), Johansson was cast as Kelly Foster, the head keeper at Rosemoor Animal Park, which has been purchased by Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) in an effort to make a fresh start with his two young children following the death of his wife. Johansson remained in biopic mode to play Janet Leigh in Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock (2012), which featured Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock and Helen Mirren as his screenwriter wife Alma Reville in a reconstruction of the making of the 1960 horror classic, Psycho. She also put in an appearance in a pair of actualities, Cindy Meehl's Buck (2011) and Robert B. Weide's Woody Allen: A Documentary (2012), with the former profiling horse whisperer Buck Brannaman. More recently, she has also guested in Michael Fiore and Erik Sharkey's Floyd Norman: An Animated Life (2016), which charts the career of the first African-American animator at Disney.

Back on the fiction beat, Johansson played Barbara Sugarman in Joseph Gordon-Levitt's quirky romcom, Don Jon (2013), in which the debuting writer-director also took the role of New Jersey bartender and pornography addict, Jon Martello, Jr. Later the same year, Johansson replaced Samantha Morton to make a deep impression without actually being seen as the voice of Samantha, the computer operating system that beguiles Los Angeles lonelyheart Joaquin Phoenix in Spike Jonze's Her. But Johansson's most memorable performance of 2013 saw her driving around Glasgow in a van and improvising in an English accent with members of the public who had no idea they were in a movie (or being lined up by a ravenous, if emotionally impassive alien) in Jonathan Glazer's compelling adaptation of Michel Faber's Under the Skin, which earned her a BIFA nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a British Independent Film.

By now divorced from Reynolds, Johansson married French businessman Romain Dauriac and gave birth to their daughter, Rose Dorothy, on 30 August 2014. She remained active throughout the year, however, as she played Molly, the hostess at Gauloise, the Los Angeles restaurant where Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) falls out with owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman) in Favreau's Chef. Moreover, she found time to take the role of Lucy Miller that had long been linked with Angelina Jolie in Luc Besson's Lucy (both 2014), which centres on the psychokinetic powers that are unleashed when the title character's boyfriend and a Korean gangster trick her into becoming a drug mule.

The critics were largely unconvinced by Besson's sci-fi thriller and Johansson sought refuge in the MCU before re-emerging to reunite with the Coen Brothers on Hail, Caesar! (2016), which sees her play DeeAnna Moran, a synchronised swimming star in the mould of Esther Williams, whose out-of-wedlock pregnancy is hushed up by the front office at Capitol Pictures, which is currently shooting a Roman epic with the fading Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) and a chic comedy of manners with cowboy star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich).

And On to Oscar nominations

Having been directed by Martin Scorsese in a commercial for the Dolce & Gabbana fragrance, The One, and having been awarded an honorary César by the French film industry, Johansson hooked up with Jon Favreau again to voice Kaa in Disney's live-action remake of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (2016). Johansson returned to vocal duties as Ash the punk porcupine in Garth Jennings's witty CGI jukebox picture, Sing (2016), and as Nutmeg the show dog in Wes Anderson's stop-motion offering, Isle of Dogs (2018), after having joined an ensemble comprising Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Ilana Glazer and Zoë Kravitz who have to deal with the death of a male stripper at a bachelorette party in Lucia Aniello's raucous Miami farce, Rough Night (2017).

But it was her performances as actress Nicole Barber seeking a divorce from theatre director husband Charlie (Adam Driver) in Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story and as anti-Nazi German mother Rosie Betzler in Taika Waititi's audacious satire, Jojo Rabbit (both 2019), which led to Johansson being nominated for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress at the 92nd Academy Awards. She also doubled up at the BAFTAs. But the 35 year-old's Oscar achievement is not unique, as it has been matched on 11 previous occasions.