American actress Jennifer Shrader Lawrence was born on August 15, 1990. Her roles in indie dramas and action movie franchises have earned her recognition, and her films have brought in over $6 billion globally. The highest-paid actress in the world in 2015 and 2016, she was listed in Time’s 2013 list of the 100 most important people in the world and in Forbes Celebrity 100 from 2013 to 2016.
As a teenager, Lawrence made television cameos to start her career. Lawrence became well-known for her roles as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games (2012) and the mutant Mystique in The X-Men (2011–2019) film series. She is now the highest-grossing action heroine thanks to the latter.
Jennifer Lawrence Biography: Quick Facts
- Birth Name: Jennifer Shrader Lawrence
- Birth Date: August 15, 1990
- Birth Place: Kentucky, United States
- Gender: Female
- Career: Actress
- Most Known For: Her career took off when she was cast in many films, including X-Men: First Class, Winter’s Bone, The Hunger Games trilogy, and The Bill Engvall Show.
Jennifer Lawrence Biography: Early Life
On August 15, 1990, in Indian Hills, Kentucky, Jennifer Shrader Lawrence was born into a family consisting of her summer camp manager, Karen (née Koch), and her construction company owner, Gary. She developed a strong character because of her two older brothers, Ben and Blaine.
Lawrence attended Louisville’s Kammerer Middle School. Because of her hyperactivity and social anxiety, she did not enjoy her upbringing and saw herself as different from her friends. Lawrence has claimed that going on stage made her feel accomplished and that her fears disappeared.
At nine years old, Lawrence took on her first acting role in a church production based on the Book of Jonah, where she played a prostitute. She kept participating in school musicals and church performances over the following several years.
A talent scout saw 14-year-old Lawrence when she was on a family trip in New York City and set her up for an audition with talent agencies. Although her mother did not support her acting profession, she did temporarily relocate the family to New York so that Lawrence could try out for parts.
At the age of 14, she left school without obtaining a diploma or General Educational Development (GED). Lawrence claims to be “self-educated” and to have put her job above all else. She travelled frequently to Louisville, where she worked as an assistant nurse at her mother’s camp, in between her performing engagements in the city.
Early Roles and Subsequent Breakthrough
When Lawrence was 14 years old and on spring vacation in New York with her family, she was found. That was her big break. Her mother received a call the next day asking her to participate in a screen test after a stranger requested to snap her photo and get her phone number.
After that, things moved quickly: Lawrence spent the summer in New York City, where he acted in MTV ads and co-starred with Lena Olin in the 2007 drama Devil You Know. (The movie was ultimately released in 2013 after being shelved owing to a lack of distribution.)
Before this a little part in the 2006 television pilot Company Town marked the beginning of Lawrence’s acting career; the program was never sold. After that, she had cameos in a number of TV series, such as Medium (2007) and Monk (2006).
In the TBS sitcom The Bill Engvall Show, she landed her first series regular role as Lauren, the disobedient teenage daughter of a suburban Louisville, Colorado family. The show aired for three seasons after its 2007 start.
After that, she starred in the drama The Burning Plain (2008), the feature film debut of director Guillermo Arriaga, which was told using hyperlinks. She was chosen to play Kim Basinger’s adolescent daughter, who finds out about her mother’s adulterous affair. The elder version of her character, played by Charlize Theron, was co-starring alongside her. In Lori Petty’s 2008 drama The Poker House, she played the eldest of three sisters who lived with a drug-abusing mother.
‘Winter’s Bone’, ‘X-Men: First Class’, and ‘The Hunger Games’
Following the cancellation of The Bill Engvall Show, Lawrence starred in the highly regarded film Winter’s Bone (2010), for which she was nominated for three awards: the Screen Actors Guild Award, the Academy Award, and the Golden Globe. She played 17-year-old Ree Dolly in the movie, a destitute adolescent living in the Ozark Mountains who looks after her mentally ill mother and younger siblings while also trying to find her father.
As the opportunities kept coming in, Lawrence starred with Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, and Anton Yelchin in The Beaver in 2011. She also appeared in X-Men: First Class as Mystique. Lawrence was chosen by Vaughn because he believed that she could capture the character’s inner power and fragility as she underwent change. Lawrence, for his part, did yoga and dropped weight. Mystique had to spend eight hours getting ready for her blue form, which involved applying body paint and latex parts to her otherwise bare body.
As Katniss Everdeen in the 2012 film version of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling book The Hunger Games, Lawrence shot to fame at the box office. Lawrence’s character is forced to take part in a televised competition where 24 teenagers battle to the death in a post-apocalyptic setting.
On its premiere weekend, the movie shattered box office records. Lawrence went on to reprise her role in the two-part Mockingjay (2014 and 2015) and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013). By the end of 2015, the franchise has amassed over $2.8 billion in box office revenue worldwide.
The thriller House at the End of the Street, which costarred Elisabeth Shue, and two dramas with Bradley Cooper, The Falling and Silver Linings Playbook, were among Lawrence’s other 2012 releases.
The latter earned Lawrence a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical in addition to numerous other nominations. In February 2013, she won the Best Actress Oscar at the Academy Awards. Lawrence collected the award with an obvious emotional outburst.
‘American Hustle’ and Recent Times
Lawrence went on to work with filmmaker David O. Russell of Silver Linings Playbook in American Hustle (2013), where she played the emotionally nuanced wife of a con man played by Christian Bale. Cooper and Amy Adams featured together in the movie. Lawrence earned her second Golden Globe and was nominated for three Oscars for the role.
She reteamed with Cooper for the little-known drama Serena in 2014, and she later wowed audiences as the mutant Mystique in X-Men: Days of Future Past.
Subsequently, Lawrence, Cooper, and Russell agreed to adapt Joy Mangano’s narrative for the big screen, with Lawrence playing the lead. Joy was released on Christmas Day in the United States in 2015, and Lawrence’s performance quickly earned her a third Golden Globe. She was nominated for another Oscar a few days later. She made history at the age of 25 by being the youngest performer to get four Academy Award nominations.
Maintaining her reputation for excellence, Lawrence co-starred in the science fiction picture Passengers and the X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016. After a highly regarded debut in the horror genre with the 2017 film Mother, she starred as a Russian intelligence operative in the 2018 thriller Red Sparrow.
After appearing in a number of movies that received mixed reviews, Lawrence took a brief hiatus from performing. She was not happy with her films at the time, wanted to stay out of the spotlight, and concentrated on her home life. Lawrence, who had wanted to collaborate with filmmaker Adam McKay since she was 19, made a comeback in 2021 with his film Don’t Look Up, which Netflix released for an alleged $25 million.
Lawrence played a soldier with a brain injury in Lila Neugebauer’s indie drama Causeway (2022). Additionally, she produced the movie through Excellent Cadaver, the business she founded in 2018. Bread and Roses (2023), a documentary by director Sahra Mani about Afghan women under Taliban authority, was produced by Lawrence under Excellent Cadaver. Lawrence, who was eager to act in a comedy, agreed to feature in Gene Stupnitsky’s sex comedy No Hard Feelings (2023), which she also produced.
Personal Life
From 2011 until 2013, she dated Nicholas Hoult, her co-star in X-Men. She was in an intermittent relationship with Chris Martin of Coldplay a year later, which supposedly terminated in the summer of 2015. After dating director Darren Aronofsky of Mother, the actor said in a November 2017 Actors on Actors appearance with Adam Sandler that the demands of their careers caused them to break up.
Lawrence announced her engagement to Cooke Maroney, director of a New York art gallery, in February 2019. That October, the two got married in Newport, Rhode Island. In February 2022, they welcomed a boy they called Cy.
Lawrence was among those affected by the 2014 celebrity nude photo leak, which saw a number of her personal images taken in her underwear stolen and released online. Stressing that the images were never intended for public release, she described the leak as a “sex crime” and a “sexual violation” and said that everyone who views the pictures should feel guilty for “perpetuating a sexual offence”.
The Jennifer Lawrence Foundation, which the actor founded, uses community gatherings, contributions, auctions, and independent philanthropic projects to support other groups that support underprivileged children, individuals with intellectual impairments, and those in need of medical attention.
