Anna Paquin is an Academy Award-winning actress best known for her breakthrough performance in The Piano. The daughter of Mary and Brian Paquin, both high school teachers, the actress was born on July 24, 1982 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Their family moved to New Zealand when she was four, where she attended the Raphael House Rudolf Steiner School. Anna Paquin developed her passion for music at a very young age. The viola, cello and piano are some of the instruments that she has learned to play. She is also greatly interested to other fields including gymnastics, ballet, swimming and downhill skiing, but didn’t have any hobbies related to acting.
At the age of nine, Anna Paquin was chosen among 5000 hopefuls to play the role of Flora in the 1993 film, The Piano. Her debut performance earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, which made her the second youngest Oscar winner in history. The huge success of The Piano marked the start of Paquin’s wonderful acting career as she was then invited to the prestigious William Morris Agency. In 1996, she played the young Jane in Jane Eyre. She also appeared in Fly Away Home playing a teenager who, after losing her mother, moves in with her father and gradually heals her emotional wounds by taking care of orphaned goslings. She also appeared in the movies The Member of the Wedding, Amistad, Hurlyburly and She’s All That.
In 2000, Paquin graduated from Winward School in West Los Angeles. She then studied at Columbia University for a year. Paquin further gained popularity in the big screen with her role as Rogue in the blockbuster movie X-Men in 2000 and in its sequels X2: X-Men United in 2003 and X-Men: The Last Stand in 2003. She later received an Emmy Award nomination for Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie because of her performance in HBO’s television movie Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. She worked with the network once again for the series True Blood, her first time to work on a TV show.
Paquin is also a widely acclaimed stage actress having her debut stage performance in The Glory of Living at the MCC Theater. Her role earned her a Theater World Award and a nomination for the Drama Desk Award. In 2002, she appeared in the West End production, This is Our Youth.
None of the characters I've played are really like me. That would be boring. It wouldn't be acting.
Everything about being a teenager and not feeling like you fit in is just magnified by being a mutant!
If I don't do laundry today, I'm gonna have to buy new clothes tomorrow.
There are very few films or plays or anything about really happy people with perfect lives. Everyone is usually screwed up in some way and that is usually where the work comes in - figuring out how to make it believable and make it real to present someone's problems that you don't necessarily actually know anything about. I mean it is not challenging to be happy all the time. I don't think I could do it!
I just do what feels right. I think the great thing about getting to do what I do is that you can try out being a different person without having to screw up your life to do it.
"I'm not very political. I'm also not American and I don't get to vote so my feelings are not really relevant."