Background and career
Saoirse Una Ronan (born 12 April 1994) is an Irish actress. Primarily known for her work in period dramas, she has received various accolades, including a Golden Globe Award and a Scottish BAFTA, with nominations for four Academy Awards and seven British Academy Film Awards. Ronan made her acting debut in 2003, when she was a child, on the Irish medical drama series The Clinic. Her breakthrough role was as a precocious teenager in the period drama film Atonement (2007), which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She gained further recognition for her performances in the supernatural drama The Lovely Bones (2009), the action thriller Hanna (2011), and the ensemble comedy The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Ronan was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for three of her roles: an Irish immigrant in Brooklyn (2015), a high school student in Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird (2017) – which also won her a Golden Globe Award – and Jo March in Gerwig's Little Women (2019). Ronan also produced and starred in the drama The Outrun (2024). On stage, Ronan portrayed Abigail Williams in the 2016 Broadway revival of The Crucible and Lady Macbeth in the 2021 West End revival of The Tragedy of Macbeth. In 2016, she was featured by Forbes in two of its 30 Under 30 lists, and in 2020 The New York Times ranked her tenth on its list of the greatest actors of the 21st century.
Saoirse Una Ronan was born on 12 April 1994 in the Bronx borough of New York City, the only child of Irish parents Monica (née Brennan) and Paul Ronan, both from Dublin. Her mother worked as a nanny and had been a child actor. Her father worked in construction and in bars before training as an actor in New York. Her parents were undocumented immigrants who had left Ireland because of the recession of the 1980s; they struggled financially during their time in New York. Ronan holds both Irish and U.S. citizenship; she identifies as Irish and as a New Yorker. Ronan's family moved back to Dublin when Ronan was three years old. Ronan was raised in Ardattin, County Carlow, where she attended Ardattin National School. She was later tutored at home. In her early teens, she lived again in Dublin with her parents, who settled in the seaside suburb of Howth. She has a close relationship with her parents, and lived with them until age 19. Ronan was raised Catholic, but questioned her faith during her childhood. She has cited Maggie Smith as her greatest acting influence.
Ronan made her screen debut on Irish national broadcaster RTÉ, in the 2003 prime time medical drama The Clinic; she also appeared in the mini-serial Proof. Around the same time, she auditioned for the part of Luna Lovegood in the fantasy film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), a role that went to fellow Irish actress Evanna Lynch. Ronan's first feature film was Amy Heckerling's romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007). It was theatrically released in a few international markets in 2007 and given a direct-to-video release in the United States in 2008, after it struggled to attract financing. In the film, Ronan portrays the daughter of Michelle Pfeiffer's character, with Paul Rudd co-starring as Pfeiffer's love interest. Joe Leydon of Variety called the film "desperately unfunny" but considered the interactions between Ronan and Pfeiffer to be among its highlights.
At the age of 12, Ronan attended a casting call for Joe Wright's drama film Atonement (2007), which was based on Ian McEwan's 2001 novel Atonement. She auditioned for and won the part of Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old aspiring novelist, who accuses her sister's lover of a crime he did not commit. She performed alongside Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. The film earned overUS$129 million worldwide against a budget of $30 million. Ty Burr of The Boston Globe called Ronan "remarkable" and "eccentric", while Christopher Orr of The Atlantic described her as "a marvel, elegantly capturing the narcissism and self-doubt that adhere to precocity". Ronan was nominated for a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the seventh youngest nominee in the latter category. Ronan played the daughter of an impoverished psychic (Catherine Zeta-Jones) in the supernatural thriller Death Defying Acts (2007), and starred as Lina Mayfleet, a teenager who must save the inhabitants of an underground city in the fantasy film City of Ember (2008). Both films received mixed reviews from critics and failed at the box office. In a review for City of Ember, Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that Ronan's talents were wasted in the film. In 2009, Ronan starred alongside Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci in Peter Jackson's supernatural drama The Lovely Bones, an adaptation of the book of the same name by Alice Sebold. Ronan played 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who, after being raped and murdered, watches from the after-life as her family struggles to move on with their lives while she comes to terms with her quest for vengeance. Ronan and her family were originally hesitant for Ronan to accept the role because of its subject matter, but agreed after Jackson assured them that the film would not feature gratuitous scenes of rape and murder. Several sequences in the film relied on extensive special effects and much of Ronan's scenes were filmed in front of a blue screen. Reviewers were critical of the film's story and message, but Richard Corliss of Time believed that Ronan had successfully invested the gruesome tale with "immense gravity and grace". He later considered it to be the third best performance of the year. Sukhdev Sandhu of The Daily Telegraph considered Ronan to be the sole positive aspect of the production, writing that she "is simultaneously playful and solemn, youthful yet old beyond her years". The film was a box office disappointment. It earned Ronan a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role nomination.
In Peter Weir's war drama The Way Back (2010), Ronan played the supporting part of Irena, a Polish orphan during World War II, who joins escaped Siberian convicts in a 4,000-mile (6,400 km) trek to India. It co-starred Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell and Ed Harris, and was filmed on location in Bulgaria, India and Morocco. The following year, Ronan reunited with Joe Wright to play the title character in the action film Hanna, about a 15-year-old girl raised in the Arctic wilderness to be an assassin. The film co-starred Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett as Hanna's father and a villainous CIA agent, respectively. Ronan performed her own stunts and in preparation, she spent several months training in martial arts, stick fighting and knife fighting. Ronan's performance and the film's action sequences were praised by critics. In his review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers termed the film "a surreal fable of blood and regret" and labelled Ronan an "acting sorceress". Hanna was a moderate commercial success. She voiced the lead role in the dubbed English version of Studio Ghibli's anime film Arrietty. At the age of 16, Ronan was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In 2011, Ronan took part in a promotion for the Irish Film Institute's Archive Preservation Fund, in which she was digitally edited into popular Irish films of the past, as well as documentary footage. Ronan and Alexis Bledel played the titular assassins in Geoffrey S. Fletcher's action film Violet & Daisy (2011). Eric Goldman of IGN compared the film unfavourably to the work of Quentin Tarantino and commented that Ronan's abilities had surpassed the material. Peter Jackson approached Ronan to play an elf in The Hobbit film series, but she withdrew from the project because of scheduling conflicts. She was instead drawn to Neil Jordan's horror film Byzantium (2012), as the "dark, gothic and twisted" project provided her an opportunity to play a more complex and mature character. The film starred Gemma Arterton and her as mother-and-daughter vampires. Writing for Radio Times, the critic Alan Jones found the film to be an "evocative fairy tale that uses vampires as a prism to comment on humanity" and considered both Arterton and Ronan to be "radiant" in it. In a 2013 film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's novel The Host, Ronan played the dual role of Melanie Stryder, a human rebel, and Wanderer, a parasitic alien. Critics disliked the film; Manohla Dargis took note of an "otherworldly aspect to [Ronan's] screen presence, partly because of her stillness and her own translucent eyes, which can suggest grave intensity or utter detachment". In Kevin Macdonald's drama How I Live Now, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Meg Rosoff, Ronan played an American teenager sent to a remote farm in the United Kingdom during the outbreak of a fictional World War III. Olly Richards of Empire found Ronan to be in "typically watchable form" in it, but the film earned little at the box office. In her final film release of the year, Ronan voiced a barmaid named Talia in the critically panned animated film Justin and the Knights of Valour. Ronan had two film releases in 2014 with widely diverse critical receptions – the well-reviewed comedy film The Grand Budapest Hotel from Wes Anderson and Ryan Gosling's panned directorial debut Lost River. In the former, an ensemble film headed by Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolori, Ronan played the supporting part of the love interest to Revolori's character. It was the first project that she filmed without her parents accompanying her on set. The film earned over $174 million on a $25 million budget and was ranked by the BBC as one of the greatest films of the century. In the surrealistic fantasy film Lost River, Ronan played a mysterious young girl named Rat who owns a pet rat; Geoffrey Macnab of The Independent termed the film a "wildly self-indulgent affair" but praised Ronan's "tough but vulnerable" portrayal.
