English actor Eddie Redmayne was born and raised in London, the son of Patricia (Burke) and Richard Redmayne, a businessman. His great-grandfather was noted civil/mining engineer Sir Richard Augustine Studdert Redmayne. Eddie is one of five children, and the only member of his family to follow a career in acting. He was educated at Eton College before going on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied History of Art. Encouraged by his parents, Redmayne took drama lessons from a young age. His first stage appearance was in the Sam Mendes production of Oliver!, in London's West End. He played a workhouse boy. Acting continued through school and university, including performing with the National Youth Music Theatre.
Ewan Gordon McGregor was born 31 March 1971 in Crieff, Scotland. At 16, he left Crieff and Morrison Academy to join the Perth Repertory Theatre. His parents encouraged him to leave school and pursue his acting goals rather than be unhappy. McGregor studied drama for a year at Kirkcaldly in Fife, then enrolled at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama for a three-year course. He studied alongside Daniel Craig and Alistair McGowan, among others, and left right before graduating after snagging the role of "Private Mick Hopper" in Dennis Potter's 1993 six-part Channel 4 series "Lipstick on Your Collar" (1993). His first notable role was that of "Alex Law" in Shallow Grave (1994), directed by Danny Boyle, written by John Hodge and produced by Andrew MacDonald. This was followed by The Pillow Book (1996) and Trainspotting (1996), the latter of which brought him to the public's attention. He is now one of the most critically acclaimed actors of his generation, and portrays "Obi-wan Kenobi" in the first three Star Wars episodes. McGregor is married to French production designer Eve Mavrakis, whom he met while working on the TV show "Kavanagh QC" (1995). They married in France in the summer of 1995 and have two daughters, Clara Mathilde and Esther Rose. McGregor formed a production company, with friends Jonny Lee Miller, Sean Pertwee, Jude Law, Sadie Frost, Damon Bryant, Bradley Adams and Geoff Deehan, called "Natural Nylon", and hoped it would make innovative films that do not conform to Hollywood standards. McGregor left the company in 2002.
Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson was born in Paris, France to parents, Jacqueline Luesby and Chris Watson. At the age of five, Emma's parents divorced and she then moved to Oxfordshire, England with her mother and younger brother, Alexander. Since the divorce, Emma's extended family has grown as her parents both have new partners. Her father has a son named Toby, and identical twin daughters, Nina and Lucy, and her mother's partner has two sons. Emma spent much of her childhood residing in England with her mother and stepfather, younger brother, and two stepbrothers. From the age of six, Emma knew that she wanted to be an actress and, for a number of years, she trained at the Oxford branch of Stagecoach Theatre Arts, a part-time theatre school where she studied singing, dancing and acting. By the age of ten, she had performed and taken the lead in various Stagecoach productions and school plays, including "Arthur: The Young Years" and "The Happy Prince". In 1999, casting began for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001), the film adaptation of British author J.K. Rowling's bestselling novel. Casting agents found Emma through her Oxford theatre teacher, and the producers of the film were impressed by her confidence and her natural acting abilities. After eight consistent auditions, producer David Heyman told Emma and fellow applicants, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint, that they had been cast for the roles of the three leads, Hermione Granger, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley. It has even been said that Rowling had Emma as her first choice for Hermione Granger since her first screen test. The release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001) was Emma's cinematic screen debut. The film broke records for opening-day sales and opening-weekend takings and was the highest-grossing film of 2001. Critics praised the film and the performances of the three leading young actors, often singling out Emma in particular. The highly distributed British newspaper, 'The Daily Telegraph', called her performance "admirable" and multimedia news website, 'IGN', stated that she "stole the show". Later, Emma was nominated for five awards for her performance in the film, winning the Young Artist Award for Leading Young Actress in a Feature Film. Since the release of the first film of the highly successful franchise, Emma has quickly become one of the most talented young actresses in the world. She continued to play the role of Hermione Granger for nearly ten years, in all of the following Harry Potter films: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011). In addition, Emma has also began to branch out into other films such as My Week with Marilyn (2011) and The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012). With a successful acting and modeling career under her belt, and a soon-to-be college degree, Emma Watson is a lovely, confident, smart, and talented triple threat that we will be watching on the big screen for many years to come.
Ethan Green Hawke was born on November 6, 1970 in Austin, Texas, to Leslie Carole (Green), a charity worker, and James Steven Hawke, an insurance actuary. His parents were students at the University of Texas at the time but divorced when Ethan was 5 years old. His mother raised him alone for the next five years, moving around the country, until she remarried in 1981 and the family settled in Princeton Junction, New Jersey.
He attended West Windsor-Plainsboro High School and then transferred to the Hun School of Princeton and it was while he was there that he began taking acting classes at the McCarter Theatre on the Princeton campus. His early ambition had been to be a writer, but as a result of the acting lessons and appearances in student productions he persuaded his mother to allow him to attend an audition for a role in a sci-fi adolescent adventure, Explorers (1985). He got the part (along with River Phoenix) but although the movie was favourably reviewed, it met with little commercial success which discouraged Hawke from pursuing further movie roles for a few years.
He was admitted to the prestigious Carnegie-Mellon University to study theatre but his studies were interrupted when he won his break-through role opposite Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (1989) and he didn't complete his degree.
His subsequent acting career was a mix of theatre work (earning a number of awards and nominations, including a Tony nomination for his role in The Coast of Utopia at the Lincoln Center in New York), and a mix of "serious" and more commercial movies, notably Gattaca (1997) (where he met his first wife, Uma Thurman) and Training Day (2001).
Meanwhile, he also pursued his childhood ambition and has written two novels and several screenplays.
Emily Jean "Emma" Stone was born in Scottsdale, Arizona, to Krista (Yeager), a homemaker, and Jeffrey Charles Stone, a contracting company founder and CEO. She is of Swedish (from her paternal grandfather), English, German, Scottish, and Irish descent. Stone began acting as a child as a member of the Valley Youth Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona, where she made her stage debut in a production of Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows". She appeared in many more productions through her early teens until, at the age of 15, she decided that she wanted to make acting her career.
The official story is that she made a PowerPoint presentation, backed by Madonna's "Hollywood" and itself entitled "Project Hollywood", in an attempt to persuade her parents to allow her to drop out of school and move to Los Angeles. The pitch was successful and she and her mother moved to LA with her schooling completed at home while she spent her days auditioning.
She had her TV breakthrough when she won the part of Laurie Partridge in the VH1 talent/reality show In Search of the Partridge Family (2004) which led to a number of small TV roles in the following years.
Her movie debut was as Jules in Superbad (2007) and, after a string of successful performances, her leading role as Olive in Easy A (2010) established her as a star.
Actress Elizabeth Banks was born Elizabeth Mitchell in Pittsfield, a small city in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts near the New York border, on February 10, 1974. She describes herself as having been seen as a "goody two-shoes" in her youth who was nominated to be the local Harvest Queen. Banks left home to attend college at the University of Pennsylvania, from which she graduated Magna cum Laude, and went on to attend the Advanced Training Program at the prestigious American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, from which she graduated in 1998. She then moved to New York and worked in the theater as well as obtaining her first roles on-screen, small parts in movies and guest-star roles on television series. Seeking more screen work, Banks moved to Los Angeles and the supporting roles soon came, and required that she change her name to avoid confusion with another actress named Elizabeth Mitchell who had already established herself. Her first signal success came in her delightful, brief performance in Spider-Man (2002), for which she is best known despite subsequent leading roles, as "Betty Brant", the secretary of the cantankerous newspaper tycoon. (Banks has reprised the role in the Spider-Man series.)Banks followed up her performance in Spider-Man with small roles in other movies released that year, Swept Away (2002) and Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can (2002), in which she plays a bank clerk who assists the young Frank Abagnale with vital information about bank checking policies. More recognition came with Seabiscuit (2003), in which Banks charmed audiences playing the wife of Seabiscuit's owner "Charles Howard", and Banks was able to broker these successes into leading roles, in Michael Showalter's The Baxter (2005) and James Gunn's Slither (2006). The winsome, beautiful Banks projects an exceptionally-charming screen presence that has drawn comparisons to Audrey Hepburn. Though her off-screen vocabulary is at times sprinkled with Valley-speak, her performances demonstrate solid acting skill and a keen intelligence. Banks and her boyfriend since college days, Max Handelman, married in 2003.
Elizabeth Olsen was born and raised in Sherman Oaks, California, the daughter of Jarnette "Jarnie" (Jones), a personal manager, and David "Dave" Olsen, a real estate developer and mortgage banker. Elizabeth is the younger sister of twins Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen, who became famous as TV and movie stars at an early age. Her oldest brother is named Trent Olsen, and she has two younger half siblings as well. The Olsens have Norwegian ancestry on their father's side.