Megastar Monday: The “Joy” of J. Law
Monday, January 18th, 2016January 18, 2016
While “Monster Monday” takes a little break, World Book is pleased to bring you a new Behind the Headlines Monday feature. For the next few months, our editors will prepare blog posts on superstars in a variety of fields, including sports, music, and motion pictures. We hope you enjoy our inaugural “Megastar Monday.” Please let us know what you think!
Whether she first captivated you as Ree, the tough teen who tries to keep her family together by tracking down her drug-dealing father in the Ozark Mountains in Winter’s Bone (2010) or thrilled you as Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of the popular “Hunger Games” series of science-fiction films which began in 2012, audiences can’t get enough of Academy Award-winning American actress Jennifer Lawrence. The 25-year-old is the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, earning $52 million from 2014 to 2015.

Jennifer Lawrence received the Academy Award for best actress for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook (2012). Credit: © Shutterstock
Lawrence is currently charming audiences as Joy, the title character of the latest film directed and co-written by David O. Russell. It is the third film directed by Russell in which Lawrence has starred. Released on Christmas Day 2015, the film, loosely based on a true story, is a modern-day Cinderella tale about a kind and charismatic young woman who is thwarted and undermined by her own family. After she invents a new kind of floor mop, she takes on the cruel world of commerce as she faces life’s joys and disappointments. In reviewing the film, New York Times film critic A. O. Scott commented on Lawrence’s motion-picture magnetism: “Joy’s Cinderella qualities suit [Lawrence] perfectly, and she has the rare ability to combine radiance with realism. Like some of the great screen goddesses of old … she seems at once impossibly magnetic and completely down to earth, regal and democratic, ordinary and perfect.”
Lawrence won a Golden Globe and has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her performance in Joy. She won an Oscar for best actress for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook (2012), becoming the second-youngest best actress Oscar winner. (Marlee Matlin was the youngest, winning for her role in Children of a Lesser God in 1986.) In Silver Linings Playbook, also directed by Russell, Lawrence portrayed a mentally unstable young widow who falls in love with a divorced man who has recently been released from a psychiatric institution.
Jennifer Shrader Lawrence was born on Aug. 15, 1990, in Louisville, Kentucky. After appearing in local theatrical productions as a child, she traveled to New York City with her mother in 2004 to interview with talent agencies. She soon began acting in television commercials and in television movies and series. Lawrence later moved with her family to Los Angeles to pursue her acting career. From 2007 to 2009, she acted in the situation comedy “The Bill Engvall Show.”
Lawrence made her motion-picture acting debut in the drama Garden Party (2008). Her other films include the dramas The Poker House and The Burning Plain (both 2008); the adventure film X-Men: First Class, the drama The Beaver, and the romantic drama Like Crazy (all 2011); the thriller House at the End of the Street (2012); the crime drama American Hustle (2013); and the drama Serena (2014).
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