Kirsten Dunst Biography

Name: Kirsten Dunst
Born: 30 April 1982 (Age: 29)
Where: Point Pleasant, New Jersey, USA
Height: 5' 7"
Awards: 1 Golden Globe nomination

There are many children who act, but very few who do so on an equal footing with their adult peers. Kids are so often there simply to be cute, not to truly inhabit a character, not to understand their part like an actor many years their senior might. Natalie Portman did an amazing job in Leon, appearing towards the end to be far, far older than she was. But even that performance paled next to that of Kirsten Dunst in Interview With The Vampire. She actually had to play an adult trapped in a child's body, and a particularly worldly-wise adult at that - and she did it with such sensitivity and precision she was nominated for a Golden Globe. Remarkable. No less remarkable was her canny growth through teen movies into more adult material. Though perhaps overly prolific at points, her transformation was continuous and with Spider-Man under her belt, at the time the fifth biggest US box office hit ever, she could now concentrate on following her idol, Jodie Foster, into writing and directing.

She was born Kirsten Caroline Dunst on the 30th of April, 1982, at Point Pleasant, New Jersey. And the name's pronounced Keersten, not Kursten. Her father, Klaus, was a medical services executive. Her mother, Inez, was an artist and former gallery owner. In 1987, they'd give Kirsten - usually called Kiki due to her early failure to pronounce her own name - a baby brother, named Christian.

Klaus didn't think much would come of it, but Inez began to put young Kirsten forward as a model, such that she was working by the age of 3. By 4, she was signed up to Elite and the Ford Agency. She made her TV debut in an ad for dollies that really wet themselves - she would appear in over 70 ads in all - and her debut proper, aged 6, on Saturday Night Live, playing the grandchild of Dana Carvey's President Bush. All the while, she attended Ranney School at Tinton Falls, New Jersey. By now, Klaus and Inez had separated and, once Kirsten had made her first big screen appearance - as Mia Farrow's child in the Woody Allen segment of New York Stories Inez took her and Christian off to Los Angeles, hoping to see her daughter become a star.

She didn't have to wait for long. After Kirsten had starred, vocally, in the co-incidentally named animation Kiki's Delivery Service (about a young witch, and co-starring Phil Hartman and Janeane Garofalo), and had a small part in Loving, a long-running series about the wealthy Alden family in Corinth, Pennsylvania, she entered the big-time - and at the very top. The Bonfire Of The Vanities, directed by Brian De Palma, based on Tom Wolfe's bestseller, and starring Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis, looked set to be massive.

Kirsten Dunst