Johansson first appeared as a child actress on stage in an off-Broadway play. She made her film debut in the fantasy comedy North (1994) and gained early recognition for her roles in Manny & Lo (1996), The Horse Whisperer (1998), and Ghost World (2001). In 2003, she marked her transition to mature roles with acclaimed performances in Lost in Translation, for which she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress, and Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Her profile continued to grow with roles in A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004), The Prestige (2006), and the Woody Allen films Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008).
Johansson achieved global stardom for portraying Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow in eight films across the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), beginning with Iron Man 2 (2010) and culminating with her solo feature Black Widow (2021). During this period, Johansson also starred in the science fiction films Her (2013), Under the Skin (2013), and Lucy (2014).
She received two simultaneous Academy Award nominationsโBest Actress and Best Supporting Actressโfor the respective performances as an actress going through a divorce in the drama Marriage Story (2019) and a single mother living in Nazi Germany in the satire Jojo Rabbit (2019), becoming one of the few actors to achieve this feat.
On stage, Johansson starred in the Broadway revivals of A View from the Bridge (2010), for which she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (2013). As a singer, she released the albums Anywhere I Lay My Head (2008), and Break Up (2009), both of which charted on the Billboard 200.
Time magazine named her on its Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world in 2021 and 2025. Labeled a sex symbol, Johansson has been referred to as one of the world's most attractive women by various media outlets. She is also a prominent brand endorser and supports several charitable causes.
Early life and education
Scarlett Ingrid Johansson was born on November 22, 1984, in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Johansson's father, Karsten Olaf Johansson, is an architect originally from Copenhagen, Denmark. Through him, she is granddaughter to Ejner Johansson, an art historian, screenwriter, and film director, whose own father was Swedish.
Her mother, New Yorker Melanie Sloan, has worked as a producer. She comes from a Jewish family who fled Poland and Russia, originally surnamed Schlamberg; Johansson has referred to herself as Jewish. She has an older sister named Vanessa, who is also an actress, an older brother named Adrian, and a twin brother named Hunter.
Johansson also has an older half-brother named Christian from her father's first marriage. She holds dual American and Danish citizenship. On a 2017 episode of PBS's Finding Your Roots, she discovered that her maternal great-grandfather's brother and extended family died in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.
Johansson attended PS 41, an elementary school in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Her parents divorced when she was 13. She was particularly close to her maternal grandmother, Dorothy Sloan, a bookkeeper and schoolteacher, whom Johansson considered her best friend. Interested in a career in the spotlight from an early age, Johansson often put on song-and-dance routines for her family.
She was particularly fond of musical theater and jazz hands. Johansson took lessons in tap dance and has said her parents were supportive of her career choice. She has described her childhood as very ordinary.
As a child, Johansson practiced acting by staring in the mirror until she made herself cry, wanting to be like Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). At age seven, she was devastated when a talent agent signed one of her brothers instead of her, but later decided to become an actress anyway. After enrolling at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and auditioning for commercials, Johansson soon lost interest, stating "I didn't want to promote Wonder Bread." She shifted her focus to film and theater, making her first stage appearance with two lines in the off-Broadway play Sophistry with Ethan Hawke.
Around this time, Johansson began studying at the Professional Children's School, a private educational institution for aspiring child actors in Manhattan.
Acting career
1994โ2002: Early work and breakthrough
At age nine, Johansson landed her first paid role as a sketch character on an episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Later that year, she made her film debut as John Ritter's daughter in the fantasy comedy North (1994). She says that when she was on the film set, she knew intuitively what to do. She then played minor roles, such as the daughter of Sean Connery's and Kate Capshaw's characters in the mystery thriller Just Cause (1995), and an art student in If Lucy Fell (1996).
Johansson's first leading role was as Amanda, the younger sister of a pregnant teenager who runs away from her foster home in Manny & Lo (1996) alongside Aleksa Palladino and her brother, Hunter. Her performance received positive reviews: one written for the San Francisco Chronicle noted, "[the film] grows on you, largely because of the charm of...
Scarlett Johansson," while critic Mick LaSalle, writing for the same paper, commented on her "peaceful aura", and believed, "if she can get through puberty with that aura undisturbed, she could become an important actress." Johansson earned a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Female for the role.
After appearing in minor roles in Fall and Home Alone 3 (both in 1997), Johansson attracted wider attention for her performance in the film The Horse Whisperer (1998), co-starring director Robert Redford. Based on the 1995 novel of the same name by Nicholas Evans, the drama tells the story of a talented horse trainer, who is hired to help an injured teenager (Johansson) and her horse back to health.
Johansson received an "introducing" credit on this film, although it was her seventh role. On Johansson's maturity, Redford described her as "13 going on 30". Todd McCarthy of Variety commented that Johansson "convincingly conveys the awkwardness of her age and the inner pain of a carefree girl suddenly laid low by horrible happenstance".
For the film, she was nominated for the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Most Promising Actress. She believed the film changed many things in her life, realizing that acting is the ability to manipulate one's emotions. On finding good roles as a teenager, Johansson said it was hard for her, as adults wrote the scripts and they "portray kids like mall rats and not seriously... Kids and teenagers just aren't being portrayed with any real depth."
Johansson later appeared in My Brother the Pig (1999) and in the Coen brothers' neo-noir film The Man Who Wasn't There (2001). Her breakthrough came playing a cynical outcast in Terry Zwigoff's black comedy Ghost World (2001), an adaptation of Daniel Clowes' graphic novel of the same name. Johansson auditioned for the film via a tape from New York, and Zwigoff believed her to be a "unique, eccentric person, and right for that part".
The film premiered at the 2001 Seattle International Film Festival; although a box office failure, it has since developed a cult status. Johansson was credited with "sensitivity and talent [that] belie her age" by an Austin Chronicle critic and won a Toronto Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.
With David Arquette, Johansson appeared in the horror comedy Eight Legged Freaks (2002) about spiders exposed to toxic waste, causing them to grow gigantic and begin killing. After graduating from Professional Children's School that year, she applied to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, but was rejected and decided to focus on her film career.
2003โ2004: Transition to adult roles
Johansson transitioned from teen to adult roles with two films in 2003: the romantic comedy-drama Lost in Translation and the drama Girl with a Pearl Earring. In the former, directed by Sofia Coppola, she played Charlotte, a listless and lonely young wife, opposite Bill Murray. Coppola had first noticed Johansson in Manny & Lo, and compared her to a young Lauren Bacall; Coppola based the film's story on the relationship between Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946).
Johansson found the experience of working with a female director different because of Coppola's ability to empathize with her. Made on a budget of $4 million, the film grossed $119 million at the box office and received critical acclaim. Roger Ebert described the lead actors' performances as "wonderful", and Entertainment Weekly wrote of Johansson's "embracing, restful serenity". The New York Times praised Johansson, aged 17 at the time of filming, for playing an older character.
In Peter Webber's Girl with a Pearl Earring, which is based on the novel of the same name by Tracy Chevalier, Johansson played Griet, a young 17th-century servant in the household of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (played by Colin Firth). Webber interviewed 150 actors before casting Johansson. Johansson found the character moving, but did not read the novel, as she thought it was better to approach the story with a fresh start. Girl with a Pearl Earring received positive reviews and was profitable.
In his review for The New Yorker, Anthony Lane thought her presence kept the film "alive", writing, "She is often wordless and close to plain onscreen, but wait for the ardor with which she can summon a closeup and bloom under its gaze; this is her film, not Vermeer's, all the way." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly noted her "nearly silent performance", remarking, "The interplay on her face of fear, ignorance, curiosity and sex is intensely dramatic." She was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and the Golden Globe for Best Actress for both films in 2003, winning the former for Lost in Translation.
Variety opined that Johansson's roles in Lost in Translation and Girl with a Pearl Earring established her as among the most versatile actresses of her generation. Johansson had five releases in 2004, three of whichโthe teen heist film The Perfect Score, the drama A Love Song for Bobby Long, and the drama A Good Womanโwere critical and commercial failures.
Co-starring with John Travolta, Johansson played a discontented teenager in A Love Song for Bobby Long, which is based on the novel Off Magazine Street by Ronald Everett Capps. David Rooney of Variety wrote that Johansson's and Travolta's performances rescued the film. Johansson earned a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama nomination for her role.
In her fourth release in 2004, the live-action animated comedy The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, Johansson voiced Princess Mindy, the daughter of King Neptune. She agreed to the project because of her love of cartoons, particularly The Ren & Stimpy Show. The film was her most commercially successful release that year.
She would reprise her role as Mindy in the video game adaptation of the film. She followed it with In Good Company, a comedy-drama in which she plays a young woman who complicates her father's life when she dates his much younger boss. Reviews of the film were generally positive, describing it as "witty and charming".
Ebert was impressed with Johansson's portrayal, writing that she "continues to employ the gravitational pull of quiet fascination".
2005โ2009: Collaborations with Woody Allen
Johansson played Nola, an aspiring actress who begins an affair with a married man (played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) in Woody Allen's drama Match Point in 2005. After replacing Kate Winslet with Johansson for the role, Allen changed the character's nationality from British to American. An admirer of Allen's films, Johansson liked the idea of working with him, but felt nervous her first day on the set. The New York Times was impressed with the performances of Johansson and Rhys Meyers, and LaSalle, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, stated that Johansson "is a powerhouse from the word go", with a performance that "borders on astonishing".
The film, a box office success, earned Johansson nominations for the Golden Globe and the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress. Also in 2005, Johansson starred with Ewan McGregor in Michael Bay's science fiction film The Island, in dual roles as Sarah Jordan and her clone, Jordan Two Delta.
Johansson found her filming schedule exhausting: she had to shoot for 14 hours a day, and she hit her head and injured herself. The film received mixed reviews and grossed $163 million against a $126 million budget.
Two of Johansson's 2006 films explored the world of stage magicians, both opposite Hugh Jackman. Allen cast her opposite Jackman and himself in the film Scoop (2006), in which she played a journalism student. The film was a modest worldwide box-office success but polarized critics. Ebert was critical of the film, but found Johansson "lovely as always", and LaSalle noted the freshness she brought to her part.
She also appeared in Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia, a film noir shot in Los Angeles and Bulgaria. Johansson later said she was a fan of De Palma and had wanted to work with him on the film but thought that she was unsuitable for the part. Anne Billson of The Daily Telegraph likewise found her miscast. However, CNN said she "takes to the pulpy period atmosphere as if it were oxygen".
Also in 2006, Johansson starred in the short film When the Deal Goes Down to accompany Bob Dylan's song "When the Deal Goes Down..." from the album Modern Times. Johansson had a supporting role of assistant and lover of Jackman's character, an aristocratic magician, in Christopher Nolan's mystery thriller The Prestige (2006).
Nolan thought Johansson possessed "ambiguity" and a "shielded quality". She was fascinated with Nolan's directing methods and liked working with him. The film was a critical and box office success, recommended by the Los Angeles Times as "an adult, provocative piece of work". Some critics were skeptical of her performance: Billson again judged her as miscast, and Dan Jolin of Empire criticized her English accent.
Johansson's sole release of 2007 was the critically panned comedy-drama The Nanny Diaries alongside Chris Evans and Laura Linney, in which she played a college graduate working as a nanny. Reviews of her performance were mixed; Variety wrote, "[She] essays an engaging heroine", and The New Yorker criticized her for looking "merely confused" while "trying to give the material a plausible emotional center".
In 2008, Johansson starred, with Natalie Portman and Eric Bana, in The Other Boleyn Girl, which also earned mixed reviews. Promoting the film, Johansson and Portman appeared on the cover of W, discussing the public's reception of them with the magazine. In Rolling Stone, Pete Travers criticized the film for "[moving] in frustrating herks and jerks", but thought the duo were the only positive aspect of the production. Variety credited the cast as "almost flawless ... at the top of its game", citing "Johansson's quieter Mary... as the [film's] emotional center".
In her third collaboration with Allen, the romantic comedy-drama Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), which was filmed in Spain, Johansson plays one of the love interests of Javier Bardem's character alongside Penรฉlope Cruz. The film was one of Allen's most profitable and received favorable reviews. A reviewer in Variety described Johansson as "open and malleable" compared to the other actors.
She also played the femme fatale Silken Floss in The Spirit (2008), based on the newspaper comic strip of the same name by Will Eisner. It received poor reviews from critics, who deemed it melodramatic, unoriginal, and sexist. Johansson's only role in 2009 was as Anna Marks, a yoga instructor, in the ensemble comedy-drama He's Just Not That into You (2009). The film was released to tepid reviews but was a box office success.
2010โ2013: Marvel Cinematic Universe and worldwide recognition
Aspiring to appear on Broadway since childhood, Johansson made her debut in a 2010 revival of Arthur Miller's drama A View from the Bridge. Set in the 1950s in an Italian American neighborhood in New York, it tells the tragic tale of Eddie (Liev Schreiber), who has an inappropriate love for his wife's orphaned niece, Catherine (Johansson).
After initial reservations about playing a teenage character, Johansson was convinced by a friend to take on the part. Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote Johansson "melts into her character so thoroughly that her nimbus of celebrity disappears". Variety's David Rooney was impressed with the play and Johansson in particular, describing her as the chief performer.
She won the 2010 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play. Some critics and Broadway actors criticized the award committee's decision to reward the work of major Hollywood stars, including Johansson. In response, she said she understood the frustration but had worked hard for her accomplishments.
