Louisville loves our local legends: Hunter S. Thompson is celebrated with the annual Gonzofest, Muhammed Ali has a whole museum dedicated to him, and the city seems to collectively wet their pants in excitement at any mention of My Morning Jacket. Last year’s Academy Awards gave us a new local hero via a Best Actress nomination for Louisvillian Jennifer Lawrence.
Lawrence embodies the dream-success story: at age fourteen, she decided she wanted to be an actress and went to New York to get a talent agent. Despite no acting experience beyond roles in a few church plays, the agency was impressed. She managed to land one-episode roles in the television shows “Monk,” “Medium,” and “Cold Case” before being given a much more significant role in “The Bill Engvall Show.”
Her career grew with roles in independent films such as “Garden Party” and “The Burning Plain” before being cast as the lead in 2010’s “Winter’s Bone,” just four years after her first television appearance. Her stunning performance in this film netted her a plethora of awards from various festivals and critics associations, and even more nominations from the same, including the aforementioned Best Actress nomination (which she lost to Natalie Portman for “Black Swan”).
Since then she has appeared with significant roles in the Jodie Foster-directed Mel Gibson vehicle “The Beaver,” independent film “Like Crazy,” and as Mystique in “X-Men: First Class.” This year she can be seen in the thriller “House at the End of the Street” and the much-anticipated “Hunger Games” (which – let’s face it – looks like nothing more than a kid-friendly “Battle Royale” with more of a back story ).
Jennifer Lawrence has risen fast in her career, and now she is featured on the 2012 Vanity Fair Hollywood Cover. Attached is her interview with editor Krista Smith.
Photo courtesy of the Internet Movie Database
Video courtesy of the Vanity Fair website.