Part of Child Stars, All Grown Up featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jodie Foster, and Star Wars with Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford.
Rise to Fame
She was 12 when she beat 2,000 other kids for Leon: The Professional, and the first fan mail she received was a rape fantasy. That experience, she's said, made her afraid of her own sexuality and drove her toward a calculated intellectual image as a defense. She enrolled at Harvard under her real name, Hershlag, skipped the Star Wars premiere to study for exams, and spent the next decade proving she was serious. Black Swan finally let her be both: nearly a year of ballet training for a film that grossed $330 million on a $13 million budget and won her the Oscar.
In the Spotlight
May December (2023) earned her a Golden Globe nomination while her divorce was becoming tabloid fodder across France. She filed in July 2023 after reports of Millepied's affair, finalized it by February 2024, and kept promoting the film anyway. Now she's based in Paris, running MountainA (the production company behind May December and Lady in the Lake), and lining up a dark comedy thriller that premiered at Sundance 2026 and a Lena Dunham Netflix rom-com. The industry's working theory seems to be that she only gets better when things get worse.
Side Notes
She applied to Harvard under her birth name, Hershlag, so the admissions office wouldn't know who she was. At Harvard, she served as Alan Dershowitz's research assistant and co-wrote a paper on infant object permanence in the psychology department. Her father pulled her aside at 25 and suggested she quit acting for law school. In high school, she'd been a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search. The acting career was always the surprising choice, not the obvious one.