Emma Stone

Emma Stone Bio

Emily Jean “Emma” Stone (born November 6, 1988) is an American actress and film producer. Her accolades include two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. In 2017, she was named the world’s highest-paid actress by Forbes, with annual earnings of $26 million, and was included on Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Rising to prominence through a string of well-received comedies, Stone has become one of the most recognized talents in modern Hollywood. She is known for her collaborations with director Yorgos Lanthimos and for her ability to move between mainstream hits and independent features with equal skill.

Early Life and Background

Emily Jean Stone was born on November 6, 1988, in Scottsdale, Arizona, to Jeffrey Charles Stone, the founder and CEO of a general-contracting company, and Krista Jean Stone, a homemaker. She has a younger brother, Spencer. Her paternal grandfather was from a Swedish family that anglicized their surname to “Stone,” and she also has German, English, Scottish, and Irish ancestry. She was raised Lutheran.

Stone has spoken openly about suffering from panic attacks and anxiety as a child, a struggle that she said led to a decline in her social skills. She underwent therapy but credited her participation in local theater with helping her manage the attacks. As an infant, she had baby colic, which led to nodules and calluses on her vocal cords and contributed to her distinctive husky voice.

Stone wanted to act from the age of four. She was educated at Sequoya Elementary School and attended Cocopah Middle School for sixth grade. As a teenager, she attended Xavier College Preparatory, an all-girl Catholic high school, as a freshman but dropped out after one semester to pursue acting. To convince her parents to support her move to California, she prepared a PowerPoint presentation titled “Project Hollywood.”

Path to Acting

Stone made her stage debut at age 11 in a production of The Wind in the Willows at a local theater. She 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 and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and performed with the theater’s improvisational comedy troupe. Around this time, she auditioned unsuccessfully for a role on Nickelodeon’s All That.

In January 2004, Stone moved with her mother to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. Between auditions, she enrolled in online high-school classes and worked part-time at a dog-treat bakery. She registered for the Screen Actors Guild at age 16 under the name “Emily Stone,” only to find it was already taken; she briefly went by “Riley Stone” before settling on “Emma,” a name she chose in honor of Emma Bunton of the Spice Girls.

Stone’s early television work included a role on the VH1 reality show In Search of the New Partridge Family in 2004, which produced only an unsold pilot. She went on to guest-star in Medium, Malcolm in the Middle, and Lucky Louie, and auditioned unsuccessfully for Heroes, an experience she later described as her “rock bottom.”

Emma Stone Career

Early Career (2004-2009)

Stone made her feature film debut in the 2007 comedy Superbad, co-starring Michael Cera and Jonah Hill. She dyed her hair red for the role, a look that would become closely associated with her early public image. The film was a major commercial success, and Stone earned the Young Hollywood Award for Exciting New Face.

The following years brought a mix of comedies, including The Rocker, The House Bunny, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and the horror comedy Zombieland, the last of which grossed $102.3 million worldwide. Her performance in Zombieland, in which she played a con artist surviving a zombie apocalypse, drew praise from critics who called her “hugely promising” and “a tough cookie who projects the aura of being wiser than her years.”

Breakthrough (2010-2013)

Stone’s breakthrough came in 2010 with the teen comedy Easy A, directed by Will Gluck. Loosely based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the film earned strong reviews, and Stone’s performance was widely praised. The film grossed $75 million against an $8 million budget, and Stone received a BAFTA Rising Star Award nomination and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, while winning the MTV Movie Award for Best Comedic Performance.

In 2011, Stone starred in the romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love, opposite Ryan Gosling, and took on a supporting role in the period drama The Help, opposite Viola Davis. The Help became her highest-grossing film to that point, earning $216 million worldwide. She then took on the role of Gwen Stacy in the 2012 superhero reboot The Amazing Spider-Man, reprising the part in its 2014 sequel.

Notable Works and Milestones

Among her most celebrated works, Stone’s collaborations with director Yorgos Lanthimos have defined the second half of her career, beginning with The Favourite in 2018 and continuing with Poor Things in 2023. Her performance in La La Land (2016) earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress, the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical, the SAG Award, and the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival.

Emma Stone Award Nominations

Stone has received multiple Academy Award nominations across her career. She earned nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her roles in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman in 2014 and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite in 2018. She has also received five British Academy Film Awards nominations, including the BAFTA Rising Star Award and Best Supporting Actress nods for Birdman and The Favourite, along with Golden Globe nominations for films including Easy A, Birdman, Battle of the Sexes, The Favourite, and Cruella.

Emma Stone Awards Won

Stone has won two Academy Awards for Best Actress, the first for her role as aspiring actress Mia Dolan in Damien Chazelle’s musical La La Land (2017 ceremony) and the second for her portrayal of a resurrected woman in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2024 ceremony). She has also won two BAFTA Awards for Best Actress in a Leading Role, two Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role, and the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival.

Emma Stone Family

Stone was born to Jeffrey Charles Stone and Krista Jean Stone in Scottsdale, Arizona. She has a younger brother, Spencer. She has spoken often about her close relationship with her family, saying she is “blessed with a great family and great people around me.” Her mother was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer and cured in 2008, a milestone Stone and her mother celebrated by getting matching bird-foot tattoos designed by Paul McCartney.

Personal Life

Stone met her husband, Saturday Night Live segment director Dave McCary, on December 3, 2016, while hosting the show. They began dating the following year and announced their engagement on December 4, 2019. The couple married in a private ceremony in September 2020, and in March 2021, they welcomed their daughter, Louise Jean. As of 2021, the family resides in Austin, Texas. Previously, Stone dated her Paper Man co-star Kieran Culkin for two years and her Amazing Spider-Man co-star Andrew Garfield for four years beginning in 2011. In 2020, she and McCary founded the production company Fruit Tree.