“What does it say? I beat Meryl Streep,” joked Jennifer Lawrence from the stage as she won her first Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for the 2012 Silver Linings Playbook directed by David O. Russell. In fact, Russell would help deliver all of Lawrence’s Globes’ wins so far. She won twice more – Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for his 2013 American Hustle and Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for Joy in 2015.
The five-time nominee, most recently for playing a doctoral candidate in astronomy in Adam McKay’s satire Don’t Look Up, started her career with guest roles on television, her first major role in The Bill Engvall Show in 2007. But it was her breakout role in the 2010 film Winter’s Bone that started a career trajectory that made her the highest-paid actress in Hollywood in 2015 and 2016, due to two franchises: the X-Men film series in which she played the mutant shapeshifter Mystique four times, and The Hunger Games trilogy in which she played Katniss Everdeen, the teenager who leads the rebellion against the corrupt administration of Panem after winning the deathmatch called the Hunger Games.
Lawrence was born on August 15, 1990, in Indian Hills, Kentucky and was discovered by a talent scout while on vacation with her family in New York City. She has two older brothers.
There are other notable films in her relatively short career: Passengers, for which she was reportedly paid $20 million and was top-billed over co-star Chris Pratt was released in 2016. The two play passengers on a spaceship bound for a new planet who wake from their induced stasis decades earlier than planned. Darren Aronofsky’s mother! polarized audiences with the trauma the young actress had to endure onscreen in 2017. Red Sparrow in 2018 had Lawrence playing a Russian officer on the hunt for a mole in the CIA.
Lawrence is always outspoken and forthright with the press, and this was borne out in 2017 when she wrote an essay entitled “Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co-Stars?” in Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter in which she explained her thoughts about standing up for equal pay in an industry where women are consistently underpaid:  “When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than men I didn’t get mad at Sony. I got mad at myself,” she wrote, acknowledging that while she is very well paid, there is a principle of fairness that requires a stand.  
In a press conference with the HFPA in 2018, Lawrence explained why she feels it important to speak out. “When you are a public person, people are going to be asking questions that are relevant in the world … For me, I have a certain resilience, I don’t know what else to call it, and I am prepared for the lashing that comes with speaking my mind. I personally am very passionate about fairness and if I see moments that are unfair and I am outspoken about it, and if I feel that I can make a difference by saying something, by starting a conversation.”
Lawrence has made an impact in the lives of others by supporting various charities including Feeding America, the Thirst Project and the World Food Programme. In 2015, she established the Jennifer Lawrence Foundation which supports the Boys and Girls Clubs of America among other charities and has donated millions to a children’s hospital in Louisville.
In 2018, Lawrence married Cooke Maroney, an art gallery director. The couple is expecting their first baby in 2022.