Saoirse Ronan  

Biography

Saoirse Una Ronan (born 12 April 1994) is an American-born Irish actress. Primarily noted for her roles in period dramas since adolescence, Ronan has received various accolades throughout her career, including a Golden Globe Award and a Critics' Choice Movie Award, in addition to nominations for four Academy Awards, four Screen Actors Guild Awards, and five British Academy Film Awards. Ronan made her acting debut in 2003 on the Irish medical drama series The Clinic. She made her film debut in I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007), and had her breakthrough in the role of a precocious teenager in Joe Wright's Atonement (2007), which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress; making 13-year-old Ronan the seventh-youngest nominee in that category. She subsequently played a series of starring roles such as that of a murdered girl seeking closure in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones (2009) and a teenage assassin in Hanna (2011), and the supporting role of a baker in Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). She received critical praise and a second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for playing a homesick Irish immigrant in 1950s New York in Brooklyn (2015); at age 21, it also made her the eighth-youngest Best Actress nominee. She later portrayed the eponymous high school senior in Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird (2017), and Jo March in Gerwig's Little Women (2019), both of which earned her Academy Award for Best Actress nominations, and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical win for Lady Bird. She also starred in Francis Lee's Ammonite (2020).