Jennifer Lawrence Biography

Jennifer Lawrence earned an Academy Award nomination for best actress playing an Ozark Mountain teen in search of her missing, drug-dealing father in the independent movie Winter's Bone (2010). It was a fast rise for an ambitious Kentucky kid who had survived her share of audition turn-downs and then three seasons on an obscure TV sitcom (TBS's The Bill Engvall Show, 2007-2009). In 2008, Jennifer Lawrence landed prominent roles in The Burning Plain with Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger and The Poker House with Selma Blair -- edgy indie films featuring murder, poverty, desperation and so forth. After the similar tone of Winter's Bone, Lawrence posed for a 2010 swimsuit spread in the men's magazine Esquire -- a business decision made in part, she said, to show a brighter side. Since then she's appeared in bigger-budgeted Hollywood films, including the Jodie Foster-directed Mel Gibson movie The Beaver (2011) and, as Raven/Mystique in X-Men: First Class (2011, co-starring Michael Fassbender). She really hit mainstream success as plucky heroine Katniss Everdeen in the 2012 science fiction franchise feature The Hunger Games, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins.