Part of Child Stars, All Grown Up featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Drew Barrymore, and Ryan Gosling.
Rise to Fame
She started in a Coppertone ad at age 3, appeared on 50+ TV sets through her early teens, and was playing a child prostitute in Taxi Driver at 13. That earned her first Oscar nomination and enough complicated public attention to last a lifetime. She detoured through Yale instead of capitalizing on it, graduated magna cum laude, then came back and won Best Actress twice in four years: The Accused (1988), The Silence of the Lambs (1992). She had two acting Oscars before 30.
In the Spotlight
True Detective: Night Country (2024) was her first TV role in nearly 50 years, and she walked away with an Emmy for it. The season became the most-watched in the franchise's history. She also executive produced it. In 2025, she starred in Vie privee, a French-language psychological thriller, because fluency in French isn't a detail she wastes. The public reads her as quietly methodical: the actor studios call when they can't afford to get the casting wrong.
Side Notes
John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan in 1981 to impress her. He'd written her letters after watching Taxi Driver and became fixated on her character. She was 18 and at Yale at the time. Her Cecil B. DeMille speech at the 2013 Globes became a cultural moment because she circled coming out for several minutes without ever saying 'gay' or 'lesbian,' and let the audience fill in the rest. She married photographer Alexandra Hedison more than a year later, quietly.