Jennifer Lawrence, in full Jennifer Shrader Lawrence (born August 15, 1990, Indian Hills, northeast of Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.), American actress who by the age of 22 had been nominated twice for the Academy Award for best actress. In 2013, on her second nomination, she won the award for Silver Linings Playbook (2012). Lawrence was known for her versatility on-screen and her accessible, honest off-screen persona.
Lawrence knew from an early age that she wanted to act, and she began performing in school plays and local theatre in Louisville, Kentucky. At the age of 14, in 2005, hoping to break into acting and modeling, she went with her mother to New York City to visit talent agencies. While there, she was discovered by a talent scout and subsequently auditioned for his agency. She spent the summer of that year in New York, performing small acting roles and modeling for advertisements. On the basis of that success, after Lawrence’s early graduation from high school, the family moved to Los Angeles to allow her to further her career.
From 2007 to 2009 Lawrence played the teenaged daughter of a psychotherapist in the cable-television comedy The Bill Engvall Show. She soon followed that with the role that proved to be her big break, the lead in the movie Winter’s Bone (2010). For her portrayal of Ree, a poor rural teenager tracking down her missing criminal father in the Ozark Mountains, Lawrence, at the age of 20, received her first best actress Academy Award nomination.
Lawrence rose to greater fame in the role of the shape-shifting mutant Mystique in X-Men: First Class (2011), a role she reprised in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). She made the transition to stardom upon being cast as heroine Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games (2012)—the film version of the first book in the Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins’s runaway best-selling young-adult novels. As Katniss, Lawrence played a character with some similarities to Ree, another tough teenager using outdoor survival skills to stay alive in dire circumstances. Lawrence also starred in another notable film in 2012, director David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook. In that movie she played Tiffany Maxwell, a young widow who befriends a man struggling with mental illness (played by Bradley Cooper). She won critical acclaim in the popular film and became the second youngest woman to win the Academy Award for best actress (2013). Lawrence then appeared as the wife of a con artist (Christian Bale) in Russell’s cat-and-mouse romp American Hustle (2013); the role earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. She reprised the role of Katniss in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (2014), and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 (2015). Lawrence again paired with Cooper in Serena (2014), a poorly received drama set in a lumber camp in 1929. In 2015 she portrayed a benighted single mother whose entrepreneurial talents propel her to wealth and success in Russell’s Joy; for her performance, Lawrence received her fourth Oscar nomination.
