Dakota Fanning

Dakota Fanning was born Hannah Dakota Fanning on February 23, 1994, in Conyers, Georgia. She began performing as a child and made her film breakthrough opposite Sean Penn in I Am Sam (2001), playing Lucy Diamond Dawson, the daughter of Penn’s character. Her work earned a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, and she became the youngest nominee in the organization’s history at that time. Before the film, she had appeared on ER and Ally McBeal. Her early career also included commercials and guest roles filmed after her family moved to Los Angeles from Georgia to support her acting work there. Fanning followed I Am Sam with prominent studio projects. In Steven Spielberg-produced miniseries Taken (2002), she played Allie Keys, a young girl connected to generations of alien-abduction stories. She portrayed a kidnapped child in Man on Fire (2004), alongside Denzel Washington, and played the title character in the screen adaptation of The Cat in the Hat (2003). Her credits from this period also include Uptown Girls (2003), Hide and Seek (2005), and Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), in which she played Rachel Ferrier, Tom Cruise’s character’s daughter. In the 2005 film Dreamer, she portrayed Cale Crane opposite Kurt Russell. As she grew older, Fanning took on darker and more varied material. In The Secret Life of Bees (2008), adapted from Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, she played Lily Owens, a teenager seeking answers about her mother. She starred as Cherie Currie in The Runaways (2010), a film about the pioneering all-female rock band, with Kristen Stewart portraying Joan Jett. In The Twilight Saga, Fanning played Jane, a Volturi guard whose supernatural power causes agonizing pain through illusion. She appeared in New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn—Part 2. Later, she played Sara Howard in TNT’s historical drama The Alienist in 2018. Fanning has also worked behind the camera. She made her directorial debut with “Hello Apartment,” a short made for Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series and released in 2018. Her later directing work includes the music video for Halsey’s “Graveyard.” In 2023, she reunited with Denzel Washington in The Equalizer 3, playing Emma Collins, a CIA analyst who contacts Robert McCall in southern Italy. That same year, she played a central role in Netflix’s Ripley, the television adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. She portrays Marge Sherwood, Dickie Greenleaf’s fiancée, opposite Andrew Scott’s Tom Ripley and Johnny Flynn’s Dickie.