SAOIRSE RONAN The star opens up.
An Oscar nominee at 13, the Irish actress is back in the race at 23 for her acclaimed performance as a sassy teen in ‘Lady Bird’
Saoirse Ronan is just 23— but she has already been nominated for an Oscar three times. Ten years ago a scene-stealing role in Atonement made her one of the youngest Supporting Actress contenders ever. Then 13, she was dazzled to be at the ceremony alongside Cate Blanchett and George Clooney. “To me as a kid, the Oscars was a show that would come on the telly,” says the Irish actress. “I was really excited to be there!”
She went on to play a murder victim in 2009’s The Lovely Bones, but Ronan’s second Oscar nod came in 2016 for the hit romantic drama Brooklyn. Now, she’s nominated again for her new movie Lady Bird. As a spunky Sacramento teen who clashes with her mother (Laurie Metcalf ) and teachers, she’s winning over critics and crowds alike. Mostly home-schooled in Dublin, she had never before set foot in a US high school. “My references were Saved by the Bell and Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” says Ronan, joking that in the movie, “I got to actually do prom.” Ronan was born in New York, but her immigrant parents moved back to Ireland when she was 3 because of her father’s work as an actor. (She says
“My references were Saved by the Bell and Sabrina the Teenage Witch”
playing an Irish transplant in Brooklyn was “very emotional because it was my mom and dad’s story.”)
Lady Bird director Greta Gerwig calls her “an incredible technical actress, able to master accents and physically inhabiting a person who is definitively not her” while also having “access to something completely spontaneous and uncontrolled and alive.” As she leaves child stardom behind, Ronan says she relates to her teen character’s swirling mix of self-doubt and confidence:
“Feeling like you can do anything but not knowing what that is or what you’re going to be—i could identify with that.”