In the mid-2000s, when gossip stories about twenty-something actresses behaving badly dominated headlines, Scarlett Johansson was nowhere to be found. Johansson was certainly one of the most respected actresses of her generation, having made an impact in a number of roles as intriguing young muses to older men in crisis, but she preferred to limit her dramatic behavior to movie screens. For her physical allure and intelligence, the born-and-bred New Yorker was courted by creative filmmakers like Robert Redford - who gave her a breakout role in "The Horse Whisperer" (1998) - the C n Brothers, Frank Miller and Woody Allen, who cast her in his late-career hits "Match Point" (2005) and "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" (2008). Johansson's translucent skin, curvy figure and flair for distant melancholy made her well-suited for period dramas like "Girl with the Pearl Earring" (2003) and "The Other Boleyn Girl" (2008), but the versatile actress also connected with young adult audiences for personifying the complex modern woman in films like "Ghost World" (2001) and "Lost in Translation" (2003), for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination. Johansson's number of intellectual CLICK HERE FOR MORE PHOTOS
pursuits outside of Hollywood also suggested that the poised performer would still be going strong when others her age had long since burnt out.
Johansson - and her twin brother, Hunter - were born in New York City, NY on Nov. 22, 1984. Raised in Manhattan where her father was an architect and her mother a producer, she was singing, dancing and acting from the time she was very young. Her movie buff mother cooperated by taking her to auditions where she was so un-childlike that commercial directors passed her over but film and theater directors were captivated. She studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute and made her stage debut at age eight in 1993's "Sophistry" at Playwrights Horizons Theatre. When Johansson was 10, she launched her film career in Rob Reiner's disastrous "North" (1994), a family film about a boy who seeks emancipation and travels the world searching for a new family. The following year, Johansson's instinctively natural acting skill came to attention in the legal thriller "Just Cause" (1995), where she played the daughter of a couple (Sean Connery and Kate Capshaw) who are terrorized by a convicted rapist (Blair Underwood). While attending the Children's Professional School in New York, the focused young actress carried on full steam ahead with a film career, appearing in two films in 1996. She earned notice as one of Eric Schaeffer's wise charges in "If Lucy Fell" and took a co-starring role in the understated independent "Manny & Lo" (1996). Johansson's finely crafted portrayal of a rather sensible 11-year-old who escapes from a foster home and runs away with her 16-year-old sister earned her critical praise and led directly to her casting in the high profile but disappointing 1997 release, "Home Alone 3."
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