Jennifer Lawrence won an Academy Award at twenty-two, spent the following decade as the most bankable young actress in the world, and then largely stopped taking the jobs that made her that. In 2025 she returned to Cannes with a Lynne Ramsay film about postpartum psychosis and received a nine-minute standing ovation. It is a considerably more interesting career than the one that was predicted for her.
Quick Bio / At a Glance
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Jennifer Shrader Lawrence |
| Date of Birth | August 15, 1990 |
| Birthplace | Indian Hills, Kentucky, United States |
| Academy Award | Best Actress, Silver Linings Playbook (2013) |
| Oscar Nominations | Four |
| Breakthrough | Winter’s Bone (2010) |
| Franchise | The Hunger Games, as Katniss Everdeen |
| Production Company | Excellent Cadaver |
| Recent Film | Die My Love (2025) |
| Husband | Cooke Maroney, married 2019 |
| Children | Two sons, born 2022 and 2025 |
Kentucky to Winter’s Bone
Lawrence was born in Indian Hills, Kentucky, on August 15, 1990, and had no acting background — she was discovered on a family trip to New York and pushed to move into the industry as a teenager.
Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone in 2010 brought her first Academy Award nomination at twenty, for a performance in a small Ozarks drama that almost nobody saw on release.
The Decade of Franchises and Oscars
Katniss and Mystique
She was cast as Mystique in X-Men: First Class in 2011 and as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games in 2012. The latter ran for four films and made her one of the highest-paid actors in the world.
The Russell Films
Simultaneously she made three films with David O. Russell. Silver Linings Playbook won her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2013, at twenty-two — among the youngest winners in the category’s history. American Hustle and Joy brought two further nominations.
Four Oscar nominations before twenty-six is an almost unmatched start.
Stepping Back
After Passengers, mother! and Red Sparrow, Lawrence took an extended break from film. She has spoken since about burnout and about the effect of being that visible that young.
When she returned it was on different terms. She founded her production company, Excellent Cadaver, and began developing her own material. Don’t Look Up in 2021 was a commercial return; Causeway in 2022, which she produced, was the more telling one — a quiet, small film about a soldier returning from Afghanistan.
She also produced the documentary Bread and Roses, about women in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s return, and showed she could still open a mainstream comedy with No Hard Feelings in 2023.
Die My Love
Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love premiered in competition at Cannes in May 2025, with Lawrence opposite Robert Pattinson. The film deals with a new mother’s psychological disintegration in a rural house, and it is the least commercial thing she has ever led.
The premiere received a nine-minute standing ovation. Lawrence had given birth to her second child earlier that year, which gave the subject matter a particular weight in the coverage that followed.
Family
Lawrence married the art gallery director Cooke Maroney in 2019. Their first son, Cy, was born in February 2022, and their second in 2025.
She keeps her family life almost entirely private, a marked change from the extremely accessible public persona of her early twenties.
The Shape of the Career
Lawrence is one of very few actors to have held the top of the box office and then deliberately left it. The second half of her career — producing, Ramsay, documentaries about Afghan women — is where the interesting work is now.
Related profiles: Adrien Brody and Kate Winslet.
