Scarlett Johansson

Born: 22 November 1984
Where: New York, USA

The young actress delivered an assured breakout performance in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation opposite Bill Murray.

The romantic tale of two lost souls who find emotional fulfilment in a Tokyo hotel was an immense hit with the critics, garnering her with a BAFTA award for Best Actress.

As a child she pestered her parents into enrolling her at New York's Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute aged seven and made her stage debut at eight in Sophistry.

Her screen debut in Rob Reiner's disastrous North was less than memorable but she attracted attention as the daughter of Sean Connery terrorised in Just Cause.

She got noticed as one of Eric Schaeffer's wise charges in If Lucy Fell and took a co-starring role in the understated independent Manny & Lo.

This led to the high profile but disappointing 1997 release Home Alone 3 and the highly-anticipated romance The Horse Whisperer in which she played a one-legged teen equestrian.

All but disappearing after this film-saving turn, the performer resurfaced three years later in 2001 in the independent favourite Ghost World, starring alongside Thora Birch as the more pragmatic of two best friends.

Later that year, she played a young Hungarian girl left behind when her refugee family flees their homeland in a Cold War political climate in An American Rhapsody.

She earned even more indie cred as a piano-playing teenager who catches the attention of a crafty barber (Billy Bob Thornton) in the Coen brothers' acclaimed period noir The Man Who Wasn't There.

Taking a break from this more heady material, Johansson would next battle giant spiders in the surprisingly fun sci-fi comedy Eight-Legged Freaks.

Lost in Translation provided her with her platform - writer-director Sofia Coppola's romantic film about Charlotte, an emotionally adrift young married tourist in her 20s, left to her own devices in Tokyo.

In 2004, she starred in Girl With A Pearl Earring, in which she plays the model for the Dutch artist Vermeer (Colin Firth).

She also took a blander role in the paint-it-by-numbers comedy In Good Company, alongside Dennis Quaid and the period romantic drama A Good Woman.

Recent work includes the sci-fi thriller The Island opposite Ewan McGregor.