Scarlett Ingrid Johansson was born on November 22, 1984, in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Her father, Karsten Olaf Johansson, is an architect originally from Copenhagen, Denmark.
Her paternal grandfather, Ejner Johansson, was an art historian, screenwriter, and film director, whose own father was Swedish. Her mother, New Yorker Melanie Sloan, has worked as a producer; she comes from an Ashkenazi Jewish family who fled Poland and Russia, originally surnamed Schlamberg, and Johnasson identifies as Jewish.
Johansson attended PS41, an elementary school in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Her parents divorced when she was thirteen. She has particularly close to her maternal grandmother, Dorothy Sloan, a bookkeeper, and schoolteacher; they often spent time together and Johansson considered Dorothy her best friend.
Interested in a career in the spotlight from an early age, she often put on the song-and-dance routines of her family. She was particularly fond of musical theater and jazz hands. She took lessons in tap dance and stated that her parents were supportive of her career choice. She described her childhood as very ordinary.
At age seven, she was devastated when a talent agent signed one of her brothers instead of her, but she later decided to become an actress anyway. She enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and began auditioning for commercials, but soon lost interest: “I didn’t want to promote Wonder Bead.”
She shifted her focus to film and theatre, making her first stage appearance in the off-Broadway play Sophistry with Ethan Hawke, in which she had two lines.
Around time, she began studying at the Professional Children’s School, a private educational institution for aspiring child actors in Manhattan.
Johansson was the world’s highest-paid actress in 2018 and 2019, she has been featured multiple times on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2021.
See these cute childhood photos of the actress;
