Emma Stone pitched her parents a PowerPoint called Project Hollywood, and won
At fourteen, a girl from Scottsdale, Arizona, built a slideshow to persuade her parents to let her move to Los Angeles. It worked. By 2017 Emma Stone was the highest-paid actress on the planet, and she has since collected two Best Actress Oscars for very different women: a dreamer in a musical and a reanimated corpse.
Stone was born Emily Jean Stone on November 6, 1988. Colic left her crying so much as a baby that she grew nodules on her vocal cords, the origin of her famously husky voice. Panic attacks began when she was seven; she later credited local theatre, more than therapy, with ending them. Her first role, at 11, was Otter in The Wind in the Willows, and she went on to perform in 16 shows at Phoenix's Valley Youth Theatre.
She quit a Catholic girls' school after a single semester, and in January 2004 she and her mother took an apartment in Los Angeles. Auditions for sitcoms and Disney shows went nowhere, so she studied online and worked part-time at a bakery making dog treats. The Screen Actors Guild already had an Emily Stone, so she briefly became Riley, then settled on Emma as a nod to Emma Bunton of the Spice Girls.
Her film debut came in Superbad (2007), and her real breakthrough in Easy A (2010), a teen comedy loosely built on The Scarlet Letter. She had chased that script before it was even optioned, and it earned $75 million on an $8 million budget. Playing Gwen Stacy in the Spider-Man films between 2012 and 2014 widened her audience further.
Later work leaned darker and stranger. Birdman and The Favourite brought supporting nominations, the latter starting a long partnership with Yorgos Lanthimos. She won Best Actress for La La Land (2016) and again for his Poor Things (2023), which she also produced. With Bugonia (2025) she became the first woman nominated as both producer and actress for each of two separate films. She also played Sally Bowles on Broadway in Cabaret and co-founded the company Fruit Tree with her husband, Dave McCary, in 2020.
Source: Emma Stone
