Dakota Fanning

Hannah Dakota Fanning was born on February 23, 1994, in Conyers, Georgia, and began acting as a child. Her early television appearances included ER, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The Practice, Spin City, and Ally McBeal. In 2001 she played Lucy Diamond Dawson in I Am Sam, opposite Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer. The performance brought her a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, making her the youngest nominee in SAG history at the time. She also appeared in the miniseries Taken, produced by Steven Spielberg, portraying Allie Keys, a girl with extraordinary abilities connected to alien abductions and family disappearances.

Fanning’s 2004 work included the role of Lupita “Pita” Ramos in Man on Fire, in which Denzel Washington played her bodyguard, John Creasy. In 2005 she portrayed Rachel Ferrier, daughter of Tom Cruise’s character, in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. She also played Cale Crane in Dreamer, a family drama about a racehorse named Sonador. In 2006, she starred as Fern Arable in Charlotte’s Web, adapting E. B. White’s novel. Her voice work included Coraline Jones in 2009’s stop-motion film Coraline, based on Neil Gaiman’s novella, alongside Teri Hatcher and Ian McShane, who voiced additional characters in Coraline.

Moving into older roles, Fanning appeared in The Secret Life of Bees (2008) as Lily Owens, a teenager who leaves her abusive father and encounters the Boatwright sisters. She played Cherie Currie in The Runaways (2010), a film about the rock band, while Kristen Stewart portrayed Joan Jett. In The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), Eclipse (2010), and Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012), she portrayed Jane, a Volturi guard whose psychic power causes victims to experience agonizing pain. She later played Annie James in the 2012 drama Now Is Good, adapted from Jenny Downham’s novel titled Before I Die.

On television, Fanning starred as Sara Howard in TNT’s The Alienist (2018) and its 2020 follow-up, The Alienist: Angel of Darkness. Sara begins the series as the secretary to the New York Police Department and pursues investigative work alongside Daniel Brühl’s Laszlo Kreizler and Luke Evans’s John Moore. Fanning played Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), a film set against the 1969 Manson Family murders. In Netflix’s Ripley (2024), adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, she portrayed Marge Sherwood, Dickie Greenleaf’s girlfriend, in the story’s Italian setting during the early nineteen-sixties.