Scarlett Johansson

Scarlett Ingrid Johansson was born on November 22, 1984, in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Johansson's father, Karsten Olaf Johansson, is an architect originally from Copenhagen, Denmark. Through him, she is a granddaughter of Ejner Johansson, 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 a Jewish family who fled Poland and Russia, originally surnamed Schlamberg; Johansson has referred to herself as Jewish. She has an older sister named Vanessa, who is also an actress, an older brother named Adrian, and a twin brother named Hunter. Johansson also has an older half-brother named Christian from her father's first marriage. She holds dual American and Danish citizenship. On a 2017 episode of PBS's Finding Your Roots, she discovered that her maternal great-grandfather's brother and extended family died in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust. Johansson attended PS 41, an elementary school in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Her parents divorced when she was thirteen. She was 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, Johansson often put on song-and-dance routines for her family. She was particularly fond of musical theater and jazz hands. Johansson took lessons in tap dance, and states that her parents were supportive of her career choice. She has described her childhood as very ordinary. As a child, Johansson practiced acting by staring in the mirror until she made herself cry, wanting to be like Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis. At age seven, she was devastated when a talent agent signed one of her brothers instead of her, but later decided to become an actress anyway. After enrolling at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and auditioning for commercials, Johansson soon lost interest, stating "I didn't want to promote Wonder Bread." She shifted her focus to film and theater, making her first stage appearance with two lines in the off-Broadway play Sophistry with Ethan Hawke. Around this time, Johansson began studying at the Professional Children's School, a private educational institution for aspiring child actors in Manhattan.