Kirsten Dunst

Kirsten Dunst has spent most of her life on screen, but the shape of her career is more interesting than simple longevity. Born on April 30, 1982, in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, she began working as a child model before making her feature-film debut in New York Stories. Her breakthrough arrived with Interview with the Vampire, where her performance as Claudia earned a Golden Globe nomination as well as MTV Movie and Saturn awards. Dunst moved easily between dark material and playful comedy early on. Little Women, Jumanji, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Dick and the Virgin Suicides revealed an actor comfortable with period drama, fantasy, satire and adolescent unease. Bring It On made particularly good use of her comic timing, while The Cat’s Meow gave her the role of actress Marion Davies and brought her a Best Actress award at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival. For a wide audience, Dunst remains closely associated with Mary Jane Watson in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. Yet those blockbusters became only one part of a varied filmography. She reunited with Sofia Coppola for Marie Antoinette and later The Beguiled, appeared in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and took on the apocalyptic emotional weight of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Her performance in the latter won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival and earned recognition from the National Society of Film Critics. Television has offered equally strong showcases. As Peggy Blumquist in the second season of Fargo, Dunst earned Golden Globe and Emmy nominations, while On Becoming a God in Central Florida brought another Golden Globe nomination. Her supporting performance in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog received Academy Award, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations. Dunst has also worked as a voice actor and made her writing and directing debut with the short film Bastard. More recently, Civil War placed her in the very different register of a world-weary photojournalist. Across comedy, melodrama, genre filmmaking and independent cinema, she has built a career around characters whose composure rarely tells the whole story.