Greta Gerwig

Greta Celeste Gerwig (/ˈɡɜːrwɪɡ/ GUR-wig; born August 4, 1983) is an American actress, screenwriter, and film director. Initially known for working on various mumblecore films, she has since expanded from acting in and co-writing independent films to directing major studio films. Gerwig was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world in 2018.

Gerwig began her career working with Joe Swanberg on films such as Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and Nights and Weekends (2008). She has collaborated with her husband Noah Baumbach on several films, including Greenberg (2010) and Frances Ha (2012), for which she received a Golden Globe Award nomination, Mistress America (2015), and White Noise (2022). She also acted in such films as Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress (2011), Woody Allen's To Rome with Love (2012), Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan (2015), Pablo Larraín's Jackie (2016), Mike Mills's 20th Century Women (2016), and Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs (2018).

As a solo filmmaker, Gerwig has written and directed coming-of-age films Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019), and the fantasy-comedy Barbie (2023), all of which earned nominations for the Academy Award for Best Picture. For Lady Bird, she received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, and for Little Women, she was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. Barbie, which she co-wrote with Baumbach, became the only film from a solo female director to gross over a billion dollars worldwide, and earned her a second Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Gerwig was born in Sacramento, California, and grew up in the River Park neighborhood. She is the daughter of Christine, an OB-GYN nurse, and Gordon Gerwig, who worked for a credit union on small business loans. She is close to her parents and they make an appearance in Frances Ha as her character's parents. She has an older brother, a landscape architect; and a sister, a manager at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Gerwig has German ancestry.

Gerwig was raised a Unitarian Universalist. She attended St. Francis High School, an all-girls Catholic school in Sacramento, and graduated in 2002. She has described herself as having been "an intense child." Gerwig showed an early interest in dance and later took up competitive fencing but had to quit, in part due to the high costs. She had intended to complete a degree in musical theater in New York; however, she ended up graduating from Barnard College with a degree in English and philosophy. Outside of class, she performed in the Columbia University Varsity Show with her dorm-mate Kate McKinnon, who starred in Gerwig's Barbie (2023).

Gerwig originally intended to become a playwright, but she turned to acting when she was not admitted to playwriting MFA programs. In 2006, while still studying at Barnard, she was cast in a minor role in Joe Swanberg's LOL, and appeared in Baghead by Jay and Mark Duplass. She began a partnership with Swanberg, which resulted in the duo's co-writing Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007), and sharing both writing and directing duties on Nights and Weekends (2008). Through these films, she became known as a key figure in the rising mumblecore film movement and was often referred to as an "it girl". Despite her consistent association with the movement, Gerwig dislikes the term "mumblecore", and has defended the style by saying, "People had gotten used to a version of a movie at a film festival that was like a calling-card for the real movie you were going to make later. What was different about these movies was these filmmakers were like, 'There is not another movie. This is the real movie.'"

Although she had an association with a number of other mumblecore filmmakers and appeared in several films, mainstream success remained elusive. Of this period in her life, Gerwig has said, "I was really depressed. I was 25 [in 2008] and thinking, 'This is supposed to be the best time and I'm miserable' but it felt like acting was happening for me, and I went back to acting classes." In order to support herself financially, she worked as a nanny and a tutor for the SAT.

In 2010, Gerwig starred in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg with Ben Stiller, Rhys Ifans, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. In an appraisal of her work in this and other films, The New York Times critic A. O. Scott described Gerwig as an "ambassador of a cinematic style that often seems opposed to the very idea of style." "She seems to be embarked on a project," Scott wrote, "however piecemeal and modestly scaled, of redefining just what it is we talk about when we talk about acting." In 2010, Gerwig made her first talk show appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! From 2011 to 2015, she voiced Pony, one of the main characters in the Adult Swim animated series China, IL. In 2011, she was cast as a lead in an HBO pilot adaptation of The Corrections, which however was not picked up to series. Also that year she starred in Whit Stillman's comedy Damsels in Distress (2011) which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival. Critic Roger Ebert compared the film favorably to the novels of P.G. Wodehouse and praised Gerwig's performance, writing "He's also lucky to have found an actress in Gerwig who finds the perfect note for playing a woman who knows everything better than you do, but doesn't believe she's being stuck up about it; she's just being kind." In 2012, Gerwig appeared in Woody Allen's film To Rome with Love in the vignette John's Story, acting alongside Jesse Eisenberg and Alec Baldwin.