Kirsten Dunst Biography

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. And Kirsten was right in the thick of it, as Campbell McCoy, daughter of Hanks' Sherman McCoy, the "master of the universe" stockbroker who gets pulled into the race struggle and is utterly destroyed.

The movie, sadly, was one of the biggest bombs in history but Kirsten escaped unscathed. Now attending Notre Dame, a private Catholic high school in Los Angeles, she appeared in the silly-but-fun comedy Highly Strung. Then came some TV work, first as Kitten in Sisters, a series about four very different sisters, featuring Swoosie Kurtz, Ashley Judd and, for a short while, George Clooney. Then there was a part in Star Trek: The Next Generation, in the TV movie Darkness Before Dawn, where she played the younger self of a teenager addicted to drugs, and in Greedy, where Michael J. Fox and others are after rich man Kirk Douglas's wealth.

Then, in 1994, she made many millions of females jealous (particularly Christina Ricci, who was also up for the role) when she co-starred with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview With The Vampire, directed by Neil Jordan and adapted from Anne Rice's horror romance. Of course, at age 11, she felt nothing for either of the world-famous hunks, even when she shared her first screen kiss with Pitt. "There's nothing sexual or sexy when you're that age", she said later. "So I was kissing Brad Pitt: so what? He had chapped lips. He was lovely and kind and sweet to me, but it was just yuk."

They were all lovely to her, Cruise and Pitt becoming like big brothers on set. Cruise even brought a Christmas tree, fully decorated, into her dressing room. Later, in People Magazine, he'd say "There seemed to be the experience of a 35-year-old actress in the body of that little girl", and he was quite right. Kirsten was quite brilliant as Claudia, a child made into a vampire by Cruise's Lestat and Pitt's Louis, and then trapped forever in that child's body, as her mind and desires matured. Truly hellish. And how quickly and convincingly she took to the vampire's life, ensnaring and slaughtering without pity - unlike the constantly wavering Louis. That Golden Globe should have been hers - though winner Dianne Wiest was admittedly great in Bullets Over Broadway.

And 1994 brought a second great success, in Little Women (another role she seized from poor Christina Ricci). Here, in yet another adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's classic about the women of the March family, Kirsten played the youngest daughter, mischievous little Amy, who grows up to be the far-more-mannered Samantha Mathis. Also onboard were Winona Ryder, as maverick sister Jo, and Susan Sarandon.

Kirsten kept going. Next, in the excellent Jumanji, she and her brother (Bradley Pierce) play an ancient board-game, inadvertently releasing Robin Williams, who's been magically trapped in the game for 26 years. Unfortunately, they also unleash all manner of wild beasts which proceed to terrorise their small town.

But it wasn't all fun. Now came some deadly serious parts. In ER, she took a recurring role as Charlie Chiemienga, a teenage hooker taken under the wing of George "Dr Ross" Clooney. Then there was Keith Gordon's Mother Night, where Nick Nolte was a US spy in war-time Germany who, pretending to be an anti-Semite to avoid suspicion, pretends so well he is believed by everyone to be a Jew-hater. Sheryl Lee played his wife, who turns up again years later, with Kirsten as her younger sister. Then, keeping to the right-wing path, there was Ruby Ridge: An American Tragedy. This re-told the true story of Randy Weaver, a survivalist whose Idaho home was besieged by the FBI in 1992. Laura Dern played his wife Vicki, with Kirsten his daughter, Sarah.

Kirsten was now accompanied by a tutor at all times because, up until her graduation in 2000, her work-rate meant she was very seldom at school. First came Disney's hilariously spooky Tower Of Terror, where she played Steve Guttenberg's niece, helping him investigate the disappearance of five people (including a child star!) in Hollywood Towers Hotel in the 30s. Then she provided the voice of Young Anastasia in Fox's cartoon, Meg Ryan providing the older version.

Now, having worked with Hanks, Willis, Pitt, Cruise, Clooney, Nolte and Douglas, she increased her list of major male co-stars with Wag The Dog. Here the President has been caught fondling a girl scout and, to divert media attention from what is hardly a minor faux pas, Washington spin doctor Robert De Niro and Hollywood producer Dustin Hoffman stage an invasion of the US by Albania. Kirsten was again excellent, this time as an actress playing a girl fleeing from Albanian rapists with her sympathy-tugging kitten. A year later, Kirsten would briefly date Hoffman's son, Jake.

True Heart, where Kirsten played one of two kids stranded in the Canadian forest after a plane crash, was Disneyesque in style. Befriended by a native and his bear, the kids are being led to safety - till hunters decide to nail the bear. This would be Kirsten's last "kid" role as next she played the unfortunate lead in Fifteen And Pregnant, concerning a family's reaction to their daughter's accidental condition. It was a salutary lesson for any girl under pressure to "give it up".

Next came Small Soldiers, where chips manufactured by the military are inserted into action figures, with suitably chaotic results. Kirsten played a tough biker girl who helps out the nerdy hero. She enjoyed the acting part, pretending she was being attacked by hundreds of little demons that weren't actually there. But she was miffed that her character, as said a girl with some spunk, eventually fell for the nerd.

Now Kirsten purposefully veered between teen comedies and deadly serious dramas. In Strike!, she led Gaby Hoffman and Rachael Leigh Cook in a campaign to prevent their school turning co-ed in 1963, playing pranks like getting choirboys drunk. In The Devil's Arithmetic, she played a modern Jewish girl who, not keen on all the tradition, is transported back through time into a WW2 death camp. Co-starring was her friend Brittany Murphy.

After that came a modern classic, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides. Here Kirsten was Lux Lisbon, one of five blonde sisters cursed with a strict religious mother (Kathleen Turner) and a wimpy dad (James Woods). When one of the sisters attempts suicide, they're briefly let free, much to the joy of the neighbourhood boys. But once Lux has sex with hunky Josh Hartnett and finds herself left lying in the middle of a football field, all romantic illusions are dashed and a sisterly suicide pact comes under consideration. It was a beautiful movie, both hazy and glaringly bright, like a summer dream. And Kirsten, in tube tops and cords, playing a promiscuous role for the first time, carried it.

Next, more comedy, as Kirsten played Amber Atkins in Drop Dead Gorgeous, a biting satire on teen beauty pageants. Here Kirstie Alley played a former pageant winner who's risen to prominence in her small town and is desperate that her daughter, played by Denise Richards, should win too. Thus she resorts to all manner of beastly violence to nobble her opponents (the police turning a blind eye), but just can't seem to get to Atkins. Brittany Murphy featured too. It was cruel and very, very funny, as was Dick, where Kirsten and Michelle Williams played two high school girls who stray from a White House tour, meet President Richard Nixon and, somehow, become not only his secret advisers but also the famed and enigmatic Deep Throat connection for Woodward and Bernstein in the Watergate scandal.

Kirsten was now putting in five movies a year. 2000 brought The Crow: Salvation, where an innocent man is executed for the murder of his girlfriend, then is resurrected by black birds and seeks the truth - while protecting his girlfriend's endangered sister, played by Kirsten. Then there was Luckytown Blues, where she was Lidda Doyles, a young girl who leaves home to find her estranged father, James Caan, and finds him in Las Vegas, where he's involved in a big poker game with an arch-enemy.

For a while, Kirsten was the undisputed queen of the teen comedy. After Drop Dead Gorgeous came Bring It On where, as Torrance Shipman, she played the leader of a troupe of cheerleaders in a privileged school. Discovering that all their moves have been stolen from inner city troupe the East Compton Clovers, they must choreograph themselves and take on the Clovers in the big championship. Kirsten had actually performed as a cheerleader before. At High School she taken it up because, being away from school working so much, she thought it would help her fit back in.

After this, a $68 million hit in the States, the next comedy would be Get Over It, where Ben Foster has the same girlfriend for years then, having split badly, he comes to realise that his best mate's little sister (Kirsten) actually isn't that little anymore. Kirsten would make her singing debut here, with Dream Of Me, and would date Foster in real life for some six months, up to March 2001. It was her first real love.

Before Get Over It, there had been two more dramas. There was Deeply, where she played the tragic heroine in a story being related by writer Lynn Redgrave (Kirsten's co-star in Strike!) to a tormented youth. And there was All Forgotten, a European adaptation of Turgenev's story First Love where Kirsten played a poor girl in 19th Century Russia, manipulating all her older suitors. A boy falls for her, only to find one of her suitors is his own father. It was typically melodramatic and depressing Russian fare, but showed that Kirsten was keen to leave High School romps behind.

She was also keen to abandon her goodie-two-shoes image, which had clung to her despite The Virgin Suicides. So, using her newfound sexual experience, she took on Crazy/Beautiful where she played a rich girl - emotionally battered and strung out on booze and drugs - who gets into a relationship with a straight-edged Latino guy, played by Jay Hernandez. This involved Kirsten's first real sex scene and, amazingly, it was she who allayed everyone's nerves. Taking Hernandez's hand, she placed it on her breast saying "You can touch them, they won't bite". After the scene was completed, in the editing room, Inez Dunst asked "Kiki, where did you learn to make that face?" But all of this Kirsten considered necessary. One scene, where she had to walk naked through the house, she didn't consider necessary - so it didn't happen.

After Crazy/Beautiful there was one last small movie before the massive fame brought by Spider-Man. Peter Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow involved the supposed murder of Thomas Ince aboard the yacht of William Randolph Hearst in 1924. Eddie Izzard played Charlie Chaplin, while Kirsten impressed as Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies, a 27-year-old.

And then there was Spider-Man. Both Kate Hudson and Alicia Witt had turned down the role of Peter Parker's love interest, Mary Jane Watson (as Kirsten had turned down Mena Suvari's role in American Beauty). But Kirsten wasn't so picky. She knew that such a role in a monster hit (plus sequels) could secure her career and give her space to write, direct and star in more interesting projects, like her heroine Jodie Foster (she already has a production company, called Wooden Spoon, with Inez). Thus she became Mary Jane, who's lived next door to Tobey Maguire's geeky Peter Parker for a decade but doesn't know he exists - that is, until he's bitten by a genetically altered spider and begins his battle with Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin. Then he becomes more interesting.

Spider-Man was an immense success, despite some of its CGI effects being conspicuously cartoonish. It raced past the $100 million mark in just three days, the fastest ever, eventually taking $463 million at the US box-office, making it the 5th biggest film ever made. Of course, Kirsten would return for Spider-Man 2 where, this time, Maguire would be racked by an identity crisis, Dunst would take a fancy to an astronaut and Alfred Molina's Dr Octopus would indulge in much eight-legged freakery.

Directly after Spider-Man, Dunst would begin to branch out. After making a fine job of comedy when hosting Saturday Night Live, she would join Richard Harris and Anjelica Huston is lending her voice to Kaena: The Prophecy (also known as AXIS), an ambitious French sci-fi animation based on a video-game idea, Kirsten playing the Lara Croft-like heroine. Then there was Levity where Billy Bob Thornton, jailed for 22 years for killing a teenaged clerk during a robbery, returns home, seeking redemption, and begins a relationship with Holly Hunter, not telling her he was responsible for her brother's death. Meanwhile, preacher Morgan Freeman is handing out redemption of his own down at his youth centre, where Thornton finds work, Kirsten playing a girl on the verge of losing herself to drugs and the downward spiral. It was a deliberate and successful move into grittier territory.

Very much in demand, she was quickly back into major motion pictures with Mike Newell's Mona Lisa Smile, seeing her join forces with Julias Roberts and Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Juliet Stevenson and Marcia Gay Harden in the strongest female cast since The Hours. Here Roberts played a progressive Californian teacher in 1953 who's employed at preppy Massachusetts finishing school Wellesley College. All the young women are looking forward to becoming well-kept corporate wives, but Roberts encourages them to seek a life and vision of their own, to the fury of Dunst's Betty Warren who accuses her in the school paper of leading them to communism and promiscuity. It was another excellent performance, Dunst portraying Warren as edgy, insecure and tending towards cruelty and viciousness. Her battle and gradual transformation would be the heart of the film, a kind of Dead Poets' Society for girls. The movie would also bring her to a new relationship, Gyllenhaal introducing Kirsten to her brother Jake at the beginning of 2003. The pair would almost star together in Spider-Man 2 when Tobey Maguire suffered back problems and was nearly replaced by Gyllenhaal.

She'd follow this with Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind where Kate Winslet undergoes professor Tom Wilkinson's revolutionary new process to have all memory of boyfriend Jim Carrey wiped from her mind. Carrey decides to copy her but changes his mind, much to the chagrin of Wilkinson and his staff. These include Elijah Wood, who's checking Carrey's memories to see how he can score with Winslet himself, neurotic geek Mark Ruffalo, and receptionist and nurse Kirsten, who's having an affair with Ruffalo but would rather be seeing Wilkinson. It was crazy, convoluted, visionary stuff.

Following Spider-Man 2, as if to test herself physically as well as mentally, Kirsten moved on to Wimbledon, playing the rising star and bad girl of the women's circuit, Paul Bettany featuring as a faded hero who has one last chance to win a major, as well as Kirsten's heart. Then would come Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, where Orlando Bloom would turn suicidal after losing millions of his shoe company's money and being dumped by his girlfriend. Then, meeting air hostess Kirsten on the way home to his father's funeral, he would be presented with a chance of redemption as he re-encounters his crazy Southern family.

Remaining at the cutting-edge of mainstream cinema, Dunst would move on to take the title role in Marie Antoinette, where she'd rejoin her Virgin Suicides director Sofia Coppola. As you'd expect, it was a sumptuous affair, following the young princess as she's shipped from her Austrian home to a court where she's friendless and endlessly pressured to produce an heir, gradually becoming both a woman and a queen. Many criticized the movie for its overt sexuality, its modern soundtrack and style and its lack of historical accuracy - it was even booed at Cannes - but Coppola argued that it was a character study and mood piece rather than a straightforward rendition of the queen's life. Given this, Dunst was excellent as the flirtatious Marie Antoinette, seeking love, life and herself despite social strictures. Next would come Spider-Man 3, where Spidey would do battle with Sandman and Venom while Dunst would struggle with a rival for Peter Parker's affections - Bryce Dallas Howard.

Things were changing in Dunst's life. Having finally split from Jake Gyllenhaal after an on-off affair, she'd be connected to Saturday Night Live comic Andy Samberg who she met in New York while filming Spider-Man 3. She'd also make a deliberate move away from her mother, Inez, buying her own house. Now receiving $8 million per picture, she could well afford it.

Kirsten Dunst is famous in the industry for keeping her family close and her feet on the ground. Having transformed herself from a cutesy model into a respected actress, she will now seek acclaim for a thespian prowess that stretches far beyond the teen comedy.genre she so dominated. And she'll do it on her own terms, as she proved when at the last minute pulling out of Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny (Cloe Sevigny infamously stepping in). That was too much, too soon and she knew it. Kirsten Dunst will be around for good - just wait and see.

Dominic Wills