Emma Stone

Her parents later sent her for private acting lessons with a local acting coach, who had worked at the William Morris Agency in the 1970s.

Stone attended Xavier College Preparatory—an all-girl Catholic high school—as a freshman, but dropped out after one semester to become an actress.

Emily Jean "Emma" Stone (born November 6, 1988) is an American actress and producer.

She is the recipient of various accolades, including two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards.

Born and raised in Scottsdale, Arizona, Stone began acting as a child in a theater production of The Wind in the Willows in 2000.

She prepared a PowerPoint presentation for her parents titled "Project Hollywood" (featuring Madonna's 2003 song "Hollywood") to convince them to let her move to California to pursue an acting career.

As a teenager, she relocated to Los Angeles and made her television debut in In Search of the New Partridge Family (2004), a reality show that produced only an unsold pilot.

In January 2004, she moved with her mother to an apartment in Los Angeles.

She recalled, "I went up for every single show on the Disney Channel and auditioned to play the daughter on every single sitcom", adding, "I ended up getting none."

Between auditions for roles, she enrolled in online high-school classes and worked part-time at a dog-treat bakery.

Stone made her television debut as Laurie Partridge on the VH1 talent competition reality show In Search of the New Partridge Family (2004).

The resulting show, retitled The New Partridge Family (2004), remained an unsold pilot.

She followed this with a guest appearance in Louis C.K.'s HBO series Lucky Louie.

After small television roles, she appeared in a series of well-received teen comedy films, such as Superbad (2007), Zombieland (2009), and Easy A (2010), which was Stone's first leading role.

She auditioned to star as Claire Bennet in the NBC science fiction drama Heroes (2007) but was unsuccessful and later called this her "rock bottom" experience.

In April 2007, she played Violet Trimble in the Fox action drama Drive, but the show was canceled after seven episodes.

Stone made her feature film debut in Greg Mottola's comedy Superbad (2007), co-starring Michael Cera and Jonah Hill.

Following this breakthrough, she starred in the romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) and the period drama The Help (2011), and gained wider recognition as Gwen Stacy in the 2012 superhero film The Amazing Spider-Man and its 2014 sequel.

Stone received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a recovering drug addict in Birdman (2014) and Abigail Masham in Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite (2018).

On Broadway, Stone has starred as Sally Bowles in a revival of the musical Cabaret (2014–2015).

For her roles as an aspiring actress in the romantic musical La La Land (2016) and a resurrected suicide victim in Lanthimos' fantasy film Poor Things (2023), she won two Academy Awards for Best Actress.

In 2017, she was the world's highest-paid actress and named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

She has also starred in the dark comedy miniseries Maniac (2018) and The Curse (2023), and portrayed the title role in the crime comedy Cruella (2021).

She and her husband, Dave McCary, founded the production company Fruit Tree in 2020, under which they have produced the films When You Finish Saving the World (2022) and Problemista (2023).

Stone was born in Scottsdale, Arizona, to Jeffrey Charles Stone, the founder and CEO of a general-contracting company, and Krista Jean Stone (née Yeager), a homemaker.

She lived on the grounds of the Camelback Inn resort from ages 12 to 15.

She has a younger brother, Spencer.

Her paternal grandfather, Conrad Ostberg Sten, was from a Swedish family that anglicized their surname to Stone.

She also has German, English, Scottish and Irish ancestry.

As an infant, Stone had baby colic and cried frequently; she consequently developed nodules and calluses on her vocal cords while she was a child.

She has said she was "loud" and "bossy" while growing up.

She was educated at Sequoya Elementary School and attended Cocopah Middle School for sixth grade.

Although she did not like school, she has said that her controlling nature meant that "I made sure I got all A's".

She suffered panic attacks and anxiety as a child, which she says caused a decline in her social skills.

She underwent therapy but said it was her participation in local theater plays that helped cure the attacks; she recalled:

"The first time I had a panic attack I was sitting in my friend's house, and I thought the house was burning down. I called my mom and she brought me home, and for the next three years it just would not stop. I would go to the nurse at lunch most days and just wring my hands. I would ask my mom to tell me exactly how the day was going to be, then ask again 30 seconds later. I just needed to know that no one was going to die and nothing was going to change."

Stone wanted to act since age four; she wanted a career in sketch comedy initially, but shifted her focus to musical theater, and took vocal lessons for several years.

Her acting debut, at age 11, came in a stage production of The Wind in the Willows, playing Otter.

Stone was homeschooled for two years, during which time she appeared in 16 productions at Phoenix's Valley Youth Theatre—including The Princess and the Pea, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat —and performed with the theater's improvisational comedy troupe.

Around this time, she traveled to Los Angeles and auditioned unsuccessfully for a role on Nickelodeon's All That.