Jennifer Lawrence

Happy Birthday to Jennifer Lawrence! Born and raised in Kentucky, Lawrence was an athletic child who excelled in various different sports, like softball and field hockey. She was also an accomplished horseback rider but had to cut back on the sport after injuring her tailbone during a ride. In numerous interviews, Lawrence claimed how she suffered from social anxiety and hyperactivity as a young girl. As a result, the soon-to-be Hollywood actress said she always felt like an outsider amongst her childhood peers. However, she would later find that acting was a therapeutic outlet that suppressed her anxiety. Lawrence, who began acting in stage productions put on by her local church, found that all of her problems and worries disappeared once she was on stage. Thus, throughout her adolescence, she appeared in several stage plays and musicals, thus honing her craft night after night. Although Lawrence loved acting for her church, it was a stroke of blind luck that would elevate her into the exalted world of film and TV acting. While vacationing with her parents in New York City, the then-14-year-old Lawrence was discovered by a talent scout while walking the city streets. The scout arranged for the teenage Lawrence to audition for a talent agent. Lawrence blew the agents away with her cold reading, and they quickly signed her to a contract. Lawrence then dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles to embark on a career in film and television acting. She never earned her GED or high school diploma, instead putting all of her focus into her fledgling acting career.


Lawrence's long-term career gamble paid off almost immediately. She soon started landing commercial work, and then began nabbing guest spots on TV shows like Monk (USA Network, 2002-09), as well as roles in films like Garden Party (2008) and The Burning Plain (2008). Then in 2007 Lawrence joined the cast of the sitcom The Bill Engvall Show (TBS, 2007-09). The series ran for three seasons, before it was cancelled in September of 2009. After the cancellation of The Bill Engvall Show in 2009, Lawrence set her sights on a film acting career. She nabbed her breakout role a year later in 2010 with a starring turn in the independent drama Winter's Bone. The film was a critical darling, and would go on to earn the 21-year-old Jennifer Lawrence her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Her role in Winter's Bone was a career high-point for Lawrence. But as it turned out, she was only getting started. Over the course of the next few years Lawrence starred in some of the most critically-acclaimed films of the 2010s, most notably Silver Linings Playbook (2012), American Hustle (2013), and Joy (2015). Lawrence was nominated for an Oscar for all three films (which were all directed by her frequent collaborator David O. Russell), and would go on to take home the gold statue for her stellar work in Silver Linings Playbook. In addition to her acclaimed dramatic work,


Lawrence also became a household name to fans of the blockbuster fantasy adventure franchise The Hunger Games. The films, which premiered in 2012 and included three sequels (2013’s Catching Fire, 2014’s Mockingjay Part 1, and 2015’s Mockingjay Part 2), starred Lawrence in the role of heroine Katniss Everdeen and have been wildly successful at the box office, raking in nearly $3 billion globally as of 2019. In addition to her work in the blockbuster The Hunger Games franchise, Lawrence also appeared as Raven/Mystique in four of the X-Men themed superhero films: X-Men: First Class (2011), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), and X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019). She also dipped her toe in the Horror genre with 2012’s House at the End of the Street and 2017’s Mother! (directed by her then boyfriend Darren Aronofsky), the sci-fi genre with 2016’s Passengers, and the spy genre with 2018’s Red Sparrow.

Lawrence took a small break from acting. She felt unsatisfied with her films, wanted to avoid media scrutiny, and focused on domestic activities during this period. Wanting to work with director Adam McKay since she was 19, Lawrence returned in 2021 in his film Don't Look Up for Netflix for a reported fee of $25 million. A "slapstick apocalypse", the film had her and costar Leonardo DiCaprio play two astronomers attempting to warn humanity about an extinction-level asteroid. Lawrence starred in Lila Neugebauer's independent drama Causeway (2022), playing a soldier suffering from a brain injury. Keen to work in a comedy, Lawrence accepted her friend Gene Stupnitsky's offer to star in his sex comedy No Hard Feelings (2023), which she also produced. Lawrence was one of the victims of the 2014 celebrity nude photo leak, in which several private nude pictures of her were hacked and posted online. She emphasized that the photos were never meant to go public, calling the leak a "sex crime" and a "sexual violation", and added that viewers of the images should be ashamed of themselves for "perpetuating a sexual offense". She was dating actor Nicholas Hoult at the time and the pictures were meant for him.