To play Ree Dolly, Jennifer Lawrence learned to skin squirrels and chop wood
A week before shooting Winter's Bone, a teenage Jennifer Lawrence went to live in the Ozarks with the family whose life inspired the story. She picked up fighting, squirrel skinning and wood chopping. The role of a poor 17-year-old hunting for her missing father earned her a best actress Oscar nomination while barely out of her teens.
Lawrence was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on August 15, 1990, the unplanned third child of a construction company owner and a summer camp manager; her mother said they had already given away the crib. Raised on a horse farm alongside two older brothers, she was brought up to be tough, and her mother kept her from playing with preschool girls because she was too rough. She has called herself a hyper, lonely child with social anxiety that disappeared only on stage. Her first role, at nine, came in a church play drawn from the Book of Jonah.
At 14, on a family trip to New York, a talent scout stopped her on the street. Agents praised her first cold reading, though her mother told her they were lying. She refused several modelling offers to act, left school at 14 without a diploma and describes herself as self-educated. Between jobs she worked as an assistant nurse at her mother's camp.
Television came first, notably three seasons as the teenage daughter on The Bill Engvall Show. Her role in The Burning Plain won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for emerging actors at Venice in 2008. After the heavy Winter's Bone she wanted something lighter and took Mystique in X-Men: First Class, which demanded eight hours of latex and body paint and 2 a.m. call times; the film earned $350 million worldwide.
Stardom followed as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, which made that character the highest-grossing action heroine ever. With director David O. Russell she made three films; Silver Linings Playbook won her the best actress Oscar at 22, making her the second-youngest winner in that category. She was the world's best-paid actress in 2015 and 2016.
Source: Jennifer Lawrence
