How Old Is Scarlett Johansson?

The Short Answer

Scarlett Johansson is 41 years old — born on November 22, 1984. That makes Scarlett Johansson one of the most-searched public figures for age-related questions, with fans regularly looking up birthday and family details.

Scarlett Johansson: Early Life and Background

Scarlett Ingrid Johansson ( ; born November 22, 1984) is an American actress, singer, producer, and director. Her films as a leading actress have grossed over $15.4 billion worldwide, making her the third-highest-grossing actor in history. Her accolades include a British Academy Film Award and Tony Award, as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and five Golden Globe Awards. She was the world's highest-paid actress in 2018, 2019, and 2025.

Johansson first appeared as a child actress on stage in an off-Broadway play. She made her film debut in the fantasy comedy North (1994) and gained early recognition for her roles in Manny & Lo (1996), The Horse Whisperer (1998), and Ghost World (2001). In 2003, she marked her transition to mature roles with acclaimed performances in Lost in Translation, for which she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress, and Girl with a Pearl Earring. Her profile continued to grow with roles in A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004), The Prestige (2006), and the Woody Allen films Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). During this period, she released the albums Anywhere I Lay My Head (2008), and Break Up (2009), both of which charted on the Billboard 200. Johansson also expanded into stage with starring roles in the Broadway revivals of A View from the Bridge (2010), for which she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (2013).

Johansson achieved global stardom for portraying Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow in eight films across the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), beginning with Iron Man 2 (2010) and culminating with her solo feature Black Widow (2021). During this period, Johansson also starred in the science fiction films Her (2013), Under the Skin (2013), and Lucy (2014). She received two simultaneous Academy Award nominations—Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress—for the respective performances as an actress going through a divorce in the drama Marriage Story (2019) and a single mother living in Nazi Germany in the satire Jojo Rabbit (2019), becoming one of the few actors to achieve this feat.

Career and Rise to Fame

Time magazine named her on its Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world in 2021 and 2025. Labeled a sex symbol, Johansson has been referred to as one of the world's most attractive women by various media outlets. She is also a prominent brand endorser and supports several charitable causes.

Early life and education

Scarlett Ingrid Johansson was born on November 22, 1984, in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Johansson's father, Karsten Olaf Johansson, is an architect originally from Copenhagen, Denmark. Through him, she is granddaughter to Ejner Johansson, an art historian, screenwriter, and film director, whose own father was Swedish. Her mother, New Yorker Melanie Sloan, has worked as a producer. She comes from a Jewish family who fled Poland and Russia, originally surnamed Schlamberg; Johansson has referred to herself as Jewish. She has an older sister named Vanessa, who is also an actress, an older brother named Adrian, and a twin brother named Hunter. Johansson also has an older half-brother named Christian from her father's first marriage. She holds dual American and Danish citizenship. On a 2017 episode of PBS's Finding Your Roots, she discovered that her maternal great-grandfather's brother and extended family died in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.

Johansson attended PS 41, an elementary school in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Her parents divorced when she was 13. She was particularly close to her maternal grandmother, Dorothy Sloan, a bookkeeper and schoolteacher, whom Johansson considered her best friend. Interested in a career in the spotlight from an early age, Johansson often put on song-and-dance routines for her family. She was particularly fond of musical theater and jazz hands. Johansson took lessons in tap dance and has said her parents were supportive of her career choice. She has described her childhood as very ordinary.

Age and Birthday Details

Scarlett Johansson was born on November 22, 1984.

As of 2026, Scarlett Johansson is 41 years old.

Birthday milestones for public figures like Scarlett Johansson routinely trend on social media, which is why "how old is" questions generate such consistent search demand.

Personal Life and Family

As a child, Johansson practiced acting by staring in the mirror until she made herself cry, wanting to be like Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). At age seven, she was devastated when a talent agent signed one of her brothers instead of her, but later decided to become an actress anyway. After enrolling at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and auditioning for commercials, Johansson soon lost interest, stating "I didn't want to promote Wonder Bread." She shifted her focus to film and theater, making her first stage appearance with two lines in the off-Broadway play Sophistry with Ethan Hawke. Around this time, Johansson began studying at the Professional Children's School, a private educational institution for aspiring child actors in Manhattan.

Acting career

1994–2002: Early work and breakthrough

Recent Years

At age nine, Johansson landed her first paid role as a sketch character on an episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Later that year, she made her film debut as John Ritter's daughter in the fantasy comedy North (1994). She says that when she was on the film set, she knew intuitively what to do. She then played minor roles, such as the daughter of Sean Connery's and Kate Capshaw's characters in the mystery thriller Just Cause (1995), and an art student in If Lucy Fell (1996). Johansson's first leading role was as Amanda, the younger sister of a pregnant teenager who runs away from her foster home in Manny & Lo (1996) alongside Aleksa Palladino and her brother, Hunter. Her performance received positive reviews: one written for the San Francisco Chronicle noted, "[the film] grows on you, largely because of the charm of... Scarlett Johansson," while critic Mick LaSalle, writing for the same paper, commented on her "peaceful aura", and believed, "if she can get through puberty with that aura undisturbed, she could become an important actress." Johansson earned a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Female for the role.

After appearing in minor roles in Fall and Home Alone 3 (both in 1997), Johansson attracted wider attention for her performance in the film The Horse Whisperer (1998), co-starring director Robert Redford. Based on the 1995 novel of the same name by Nicholas Evans, the drama tells the story of a talented horse trainer, who is hired to help an injured teenager (Johansson) and her horse back to health. Johansson received an "introducing" credit on this film, although it was her seventh role. On Johansson's maturity, Redford described her as "13 going on 30". Todd McCarthy of Variety commented that Johansson "convincingly conveys the awkwardness of her age and the inner pain of a carefree girl suddenly laid low by horrible happenstance". For the film, she was nominated for the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Most Promising Actress. She believed the film changed many things in her life, realizing that acting is the ability to manipulate one's emotions. On finding good roles as a teenager, Johansson said it was hard for her, as adults wrote the scripts and they "portray kids like mall rats and not seriously... Kids and teenagers just aren't being portrayed with any real depth."

Johansson later appeared in My Brother the Pig (1999) and in the Coen brothers' neo-noir film The Man Who Wasn't There (2001). Her breakthrough came playing a cynical outcast in Terry Zwigoff's black comedy Ghost World (2001), an adaptation of Daniel Clowes' graphic novel of the same name. Johansson auditioned for the film via a tape from New York, and Zwigoff believed her to be a "unique, eccentric person, and right for that part". The film premiered at the 2001 Seattle International Film Festival; although a box office failure, it has since developed a cult status. Johansson was credited with "sensitivity and talent [that] belie her age" by an Austin Chronicle critic and won a Toronto Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. With David Arquette, Johansson appeared in the horror comedy Eight Legged Freaks (2002) about spiders exposed to toxic waste, causing them to grow gigantic and begin killing. After graduating from Professional Children's School that year, she applied to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, but was rejected and decided to focus on her film career.

2003–2004: Transition to adult roles

Frequently Asked Questions

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