Rooney Mara descends from the founders of two rival NFL teams
One great-grandfather started the New York Giants; the other started the Pittsburgh Steelers. Rooney Mara went another way entirely, into acting, and nearly quit after a miserable horror remake. Then David Fincher, who had not pictured her as Lisbeth Salander, watched her audition and talked Columbia Pictures into casting her.
Patricia Rooney Mara was born on April 17, 1985, and grew up in Bedford, a Westchester County town roughly 40 miles north of Manhattan. Tim Mara founded the Giants and Art Rooney Sr. founded the Steelers, and both men are her great-grandfathers. Her father works in player personnel for the Giants. She is the third of four children, and her older sister Kate also acts. After graduating from Fox Lane High School in 2003 she spent four months travelling through Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, then studied psychology and social policy at NYU's Gallatin School, finishing in 2010.
She held back from acting as a child, telling The Journal News that she feared failing at it. Her only school role was Juliet, and only because a friend put her name down. Her screen career began with bit parts beside her sister and a 2006 episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Her first lead came in Tanner Hall, after which she stopped using Patricia and went by her middle name, saying Rooney was more memorable. The 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, where she played Nancy, was so unpleasant to make that she wondered whether to carry on.
Fincher first cast her as Mark Zuckerberg's ex-girlfriend in The Social Network in 2010. For The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, she saw off rival actresses during two and a half months of tryouts and camera tests. Her hair was cropped and dyed black, her eyebrows bleached, and several real piercings added; she also took up skateboarding and kickboxing and trained on computers. The film opened on December 20, 2011, and in January 2012 she received her first Best Actress Oscar nomination.
Carol in 2015 brought her the Best Actress award at Cannes and a supporting-actress Oscar nomination. Away from film she oversees the Uweza Foundation, which funds programmes for children and families in Nairobi's Kibera slum, and she founded the vegan clothing label Hiraeth Collective.
Source: Rooney Mara
