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Biography
She was born on the 22nd of November,
1984, in New York City. Her father, of Danish extraction, was a building
contractor in Manhattan, while her mother, Melanie, looked after kids
Adrian, Vanessa, Scarlett and Hunter, Hunter being Scarlett's twin,
younger than her by three minutes ("the most important three
minutes of my life", she's said). As Hunter would grow to 6'
3", with dark eyes and hair, Scarlett would later comment that they
were as much like real twins as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito.
There was also a half-brother, living with his mother in Denmark.
Scarlett's name was, in a new family tradition, taken from Gone With The
Wind, mother Melanie, of course, sharing the name of Scarlett O'Hara's
friend and benefactor Melanie Hamilton. The audition went fairly well, the agents being quite keen on elder brother Adrian, but the other children were deemed surplus to requirements. It was about what Melanie had expected. What she certainly didn't expect, though, was the reaction of her youngest daughter, Scarlett, who went into hysterical fits right there in the office. It wasn't so much that Adrian had been chosen above her, or even that Adrian had been chosen despite not caring if he were chosen or not. It was that, even at the age of 7, she so desperately wanted to make it in TV and films. Previous to this, Melanie had had no inkling of Scarlett's ambitions. She knew the girl was a big movie fan and had a thing for wartime glamour queens like Judy Garland and Rosalind Russell (her big favourite was Lucille Ball) but she'd thought ballet lessons would sate her appetite for melodramatic stories and pretty dresses. In fact, Scarlett, allowed by her mother to watch pretty anything she wanted (she'd see The Silence Of The Lambs at age 8), had a much more mature view of the movies than anyone suspected. Not only did she have an idea of their artistic scope, she'd also considered how they were made, and she really, really wanted to make them. It was her one and only desire. First things first. Scarlett gave up ballet and began the long, painful round of auditions for commercials. Often advertisers would not make it plain what kind of character they were seeking, leaving the likes of Scarlett to sit around for hours only to discover a small Chinese boy was required. When called upon at all, she tried too hard to sell herself, consequently putting potential employers off. She did not react well to this serial rejection and the thwarting of her precocious dreams. After one particularly fraught tantrum on the subway, Melanie decided they would from now on only search for film roles. She also gave in to her daughter's wise demands for schooling in her chosen profession, enrolling her at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute for Young People. Here Scarlett would study from the age of 8 till 11. Proving an instant hit, she appeared off-Broadway at Playwright Horizons, alongside Ethan Hawke in Jonathan Marc Sherman's play Sophistry, in a brief speaking role. At the Institute, she spent half a semester in the youngsters' class, then was promoted to the young adult sessions. Though always the youngest there, she would never appear out of place, her intelligence, natural ability and that deep, throaty voice keeping her on a par with the others. Now she would gain some serious stage experience, acting in front of audiences and, amazingly for one so young, learning the rudiments of Stanislavsky's Method. Unlike adverts, film roles did come her way. First she scored a part in North, Rob Reiner's disastrous morality tale, wherein young Elijah Wood tries to "divorce" his negligent parents and seeks better options elsewhere, notably in Texas, Alaska and France. Scarlett would play Laura Nelson, screen daughter of John Ritter and Faith Ford, inhabitants of the sunny suburb of Bedford, who prove to be Wood's best alternative family. Next would come a very different proposition in Just Cause. Here she was the young daughter of Sean Connery and Kate Capshaw, Connery being a Harvard law professor agitating against capital punishment, who's asked to return to practice and defend an apparently innocent man on Death Row in Florida. There are many twists and turns, one involving Ed Harris as an impressively barmy psycho, before Scarlett finds herself terrorised by the real villain of the piece. Working with Connery was a thrilling experience for the young actress, and there was sterling advice too from co-star Laurence Fishburne. Sitting beside on a plane, he asked if she wanted to be an actress or a star - at some point she was going to have to choose. More potential Hollywood pitfalls would be pointed out to her later by former wild child Drew Barrymore. Having been attending public school in New York, Scarlett would be informed that her absences for work would not be tolerated. She'd transfer to a private establishment, then later receive tuition onset. Eventually she'd attend the Professional Children's School in Manhattan, graduating in Sping, 2002. After her high-budget entry, she stepped back onto a lower level for a while with appearances in two movies by comedian and auteur Eric Schaeffer. The first of these was If Lucy Fell where two friends, teacher Schaeffer and therapist Sarah Jessica Parker agreed a suicide pact if neither of them finds true love in 28 days, Schaeffer seeking it with neighbour Elle Macpherson and Parker with nutty action artist Ben Stiller. Scarlett would play one of Schaeffer's wise young charges. Then came Fall, a more serious romance where cab driver Schaeffer engages in an affair with lonely, unhappily married supermodel Amanda de Cadenet and has to live with the fall-out. Between these two came a movie that would bring Johansson to the attention of the industry, including one Sofia Coppola, then looking towards a career in directing. This was Manny And Lo, written and directed by former Jim Jarmusch aide Lisa Krueger. Here 16-year-old Lo (Aleksa Palladino) and her younger sister Manny (Scarlett) are both in foster homes after their drunken stoner mum has handed them over. Lo breaks out, rescues her sister, hot-wires a motor and the pair find freedom by stealing groceries and living in model homes. Then, with Lo falling pregnant, they kidnap a clerk from a baby supplies store and hole up in a remote cabin, their need for a mother gradually being balanced by their victim's desire for children. With Scarlett narrating as well as playing a more sensible foil to her wayward sister, the movie was recognised as an excellent character study, earning Johansson an Independent Spirit nomination. Now she moved on to her first kids' movie, Home Alone 3. Here, briefly, she played the older sister of Alex D Linz, a child home alone with chicken pox, who foils, electrocutes and generally tortures a gang of international criminals systematically breaking into every house in the street looking for a computer chip hidden in a toy car. All in all, it was a reasonable sequel, and brought up interesting parallels between Johansson and the franchise's original star, Macauley Culkin. Having attended the Lee Strasberg Institute, worked with Sean Connery and Rob Reiner, then gained experience in the New York independent scene, all the while avoiding kiddies' fare, Scarlett was clearly looking to avoid the disaster that adolescence had visited upon Culkin. She proved this further with her next picture, Robert Redford's adaptation of Nicholas Evans' bestseller The Horse Whisperer. At first the movie was supposed to have featured Natalie Portman but, after a series of production delays, she pulled out to take The Diary Of Anne Frank on Broadway. In stepped Scarlett (the credits would read "Introducing Scarlett Johansson") to play Grace Maclean, a young girl who suffers a terrible accident while out riding her horse in a snowy wood, she losing her foot and the horse its mind. Mother Kristin Scott Thomas, a pushy magazine editor, believes that if her beloved mount recovers so will Grace, so she badgers horse-doctor Redford to let them all stay on his Montana ranch while he works on soothing the steed. As it happens, Redford's famed patience works on both horse and girl, as he teaches her to drive, calms her anger and convinces her that, even disfigured, she can be loved. Indeed, as Redford and Scott Thomas's love scenes lacked a certain spark, it was his work with Johansson that made the film so impressive. Afterwards, Redford would describe his young co-star as "13 going on 30". Johansson, in her usual smart and humorous manner, would recall Redford directing her in the accident scene, where the truck is approaching. Trying to summon suspense and dread in the young actress he slowly approached her, off-camera, saying "And it comes to you, closer . . . closer . . . closer". And all the while Johansson was thinking "This isn't scary. It's every middle-aged woman's dream come true". For her work on The Horse Whisperer, Scarlett would be nominated for a Young Artist award. She would not, though, be inundated with work. For a while, the only offers she received were to play "horseback champions with fatal diseases" or sexy teens menaced by be-masked slaughterers. Luckily, her family was not in need of money, so she could afford to bide her time, taking only the family comedy My Brother The Pig. Here she played a 14-year-old enduring all the usual insecurities and ultra-dramas of that age, as well as being pestered continually by her wind-up merchant of a little brother. However, when the brother is turned into a pig by his voodoo-practising nanny, Scarlett must draw upon her sense of forgiveness and take the pig to Mexico, avoiding enthusiastic butchers along the way, in search of the nanny's granny, the only one who can reverse the spell. The movie was acceptable light-hearted fun, very different from her next feature, the sophisticated black comedy Ghost World. Based on Daniel Clowes' graphic novel, this saw Scarlett and Thora Birch as two friends, drawn together by their scorn for society and their peers, who are about to graduate from High School. Bored and contemptuous, everyone is a target for their smart-arsed ridicule, from jocks to wheelchair victims. Together, they plan to skip college, rent a flat and continue their unconventional existence in thrift shops, video stores and old-style diners. But then Scarlett gets a job in a coffee-house and reveals an all-too-normal ambition, leaving Birch to ward off loneliness with the aid of weirdo record-freak Steve Buscemi. Though the movie was based around Birch's character, Johansson made a great showing as Rebecca, the inadvertent traitor who sacrifices painful integrity for empty conformity. Particularly in the early scenes, where she and Birch hilariously snap against the shallowness and stupidity of their world, she was tremendous, that husky voice serving her brilliantly well (she'd actually be described as "the new Lauren Bacall"). Ghost World would manage that rare double of making money and being hip. Hip would certainly describe her next outing, too. In the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There, Billy Bob Thornton played a lowly 1940s barber who plots to escape from his small-town lethargy by blackmailing his wife's businessman lover, James Gandolfini, a plan that leads to much confusion and sloppy murder. As the catastrophe unfolds, Thornton spots Birdy (Scarlett) playing piano at a works Christmas party, her youthful innocence and spirited rendition of Beethoven proving too much for this thoughtful but massively inhibited fellow. Though he'd never act on his feelings, he becomes infatuated with her, encouraging her in her playing as a substitute for more earthy advances. And, for her part, she proves to be far from the naïve ingenue he'd thought her to be, in gratitude going down on him in his car, forcing from him the side-splitting exclamation "Heavens to Betsy!" This was a wicked take on classic noir cinema (the film was actually released in black and white) where no one is as they seem and all purity is just a skin-thin coating on a lake of turpitude. Again Johansson was excellent. Having overplayed her hand in those ad auditions years before, she had learned to control her efforts, never vamping or overstating - she's said she hates that in other actresses. As Birdy, she gave nothing away, allowing Thornton, and the audience to think what they would - and thus expertly setting up their big shock. Following this came An American Rhapsody, written and directed by Eva Gardos, who'd been editor on both Mask and Barfly. An autobiographical piece, it saw a family fleeing Hungary to escape the Stalinist purges but leaving a new-born daughter behind with foster parents. When the child is 6, they return to bring her to their new home in America. Nine years later, the girl (now embodied by Scarlett) tries hard to be a child of the Sixties, smoking and sneaking out the bedroom window to be with her boyfriend. But her transplantation has marked her, she feels her mother (Nastassja Kinski) has stolen her from her "real" parents in Hungary, she's glowering and hostile, purposefully secretive and brimming over with passive aggression. Only when her demands to return to her birthplace are met does she have any idea why she is where she is. This was a demanding role, complex beyond most teen parts, and it won Scarlett a Young Artist award. Yet still, despite having proven her quality, it didn't lead to a run of prime parts, mostly because, when needing teen actors, most casting agents were seeking young-looking 24-year-olds. Instead, Johansson contented herself with the roustabout comedy horror of Eight Legged Freaks. Here a barrel of toxic waste is spilled near Prosperity, Arizona and turns a local scientist's spider collection into a riot of man-eating monsters. Meanwhile David Arquette is back in town and rekindling a romance with cute Sheriff Kari Wuhrer. At first Scarlett's role as the Sheriff's daughter seemed superfluous, but quickly she became the town's unheeded Cassandra and joined in the fight as the movie reached a Dawn Of The Dead-style shopping mall crescendo. As comedy horrors go, Eight Legged Freaks was a superior effort, both funny and thrilling. And Johansson's cannily chosen series of successes continued with Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation. As said, Coppola had spotted Scarlett's performance in Manny And Lo and, once Bill Murray had agreed to play the male lead, brought her onboard as Charlotte, a recently married Yale philosophy grad hanging around Tokyo while her photographer husband, Giovanni Ribisi, completes a job. In the same hotel she meets Murray, a much older film star in the city for a multi-million-dollar whiskey ad. He's lost, distanced from his family and no longer sure what he's working towards. She's lost, too, her marriage having drifted into indolence and her ambitions turned to mist. And, over one week in Japan, in patchinko and karaoke joints and especially in the hotel bar, they discuss their lives and gradually fall in love. It was wonderful stuff. Despite a 35 year age difference, the two leads made their sexless affair wholly credible and truly moving. Once more Scarlett had succeeded, managing to shine even when under fire from Murray's notorious ad-libbing. She won a BAFTA and was nominated for a Golden Globe, though at the Oscars she was oddly ignored. Still more glory was to come immediately when she was also Golden Globe - and BAFTA - nominated for her next picture, Girl With A Pearl Earring, based on Tracy Chevalier's speculative novel. Set in 17th Century Amsterdam, this saw her taken on as a maid in the house of artist Johannes Vermeer, played by a typically smouldering and vulnerable Colin Firth. Though a peasant, she instinctively appreciates art and comes to help him in his studio. In turn, he recognises her natural eye and appreciates her beauty. He'd like to paint her but daren't for the scandal it would cause in the house. Lucky for the art world, then, when Firth's patron Tom Wilkinson fancies her arse off and demands a portrait (as the old saying goes - paint a portrait, it'll last longer). Once more Johansson was excellent, in her relationship with Firth, her discovery and gradual understanding of his work, and her tryst with the butcher's boy, a lover more appropriate for one of her lowly standing. Yet once again she was overlooked at the Oscars. Having now left school, 2004 would see her rise to her highest profile yet. After Girl With A Pearl Earring she's star in The Perfect Score as one of a gang of High School seniors who break into the Princeton Testing Centre and steal the answers to their SATs, only to discover that getting 100% in a test doesn't necessarily make you happy. Then would come A Love Song For Bobby Long where she played a headstrong girl of trailer-trash extraction who inherits a New Orleans home from her mother only to find despairing drunken wasters John Travolta and Gabriel Macht living there. Naturally, her ebullience and natural radiance lifts the men out of the trough of despond. The movie would be interesting in several ways beyond the work itself. First, it saw Johansson coupling with Travolta and thus, after Murray, Thornton and Firth, continuing a notable series of much, much older lovers (it's to her credit that she's not been overshadowed by any of them). Second, the movie was co-produced by Melanie Johansson. And third it was financed by El Camino Pictures, a company set up by the William Morris Agency to finance low-budget ($5-10 million) films by their clients (Travolta, Johansson and director Shainee Gabel were all Morris clients) and others. The "others" was very important there, as agents have an agreement with the Actors' Guild that they should never be producers, lest total monopolies be born. It appeared that El Camino Pictures, perhaps, was threatening that agreement. Whatever the source of her employment, the buzz around her meant that Scarlett was not wanting for work. She moved on to A Good Woman, an update of Oscar Wilde's first successful comedy, Lady Windermere's Fan, here set in the 1930s. Helen Hunt played Mrs Erlynne, a woman of a certain age and reputation who, due to unpaid bills in New York City, travels to the Amalfi coast to seek out newly wed New York socialites, the Windermeres (Scarlett being the Lady Windermere of Wilde's title). Now begins a comedy of manners, hypocrisy, scandal, betrayal and secret loyalty as Scarlett suspects Hunt of nailing her hubbie and engages in naughtiness of her own with that immense cad Lord Darlington (Stephen Campbell Moore). There can be no doubt that in her maturity, experience and smart role-selection, Scarlett Johansson has made herself into perhaps the finest actress of her generation. Having been bloodymindedly pushing for it since the age of 7, you can't say she doesn't deserve it. ~ Dominic Wills |
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