Anna Paquin

Anna Paquin (born July 24, 1982, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) is a Canadian-born New Zealand actress who, as a child, won an Academy Award for best supporting actress for her portrayal of the loquacious and inquisitive daughter of the lead character, played by Holly Hunter, in the atmospheric romance film The Piano (1993).

Paquin moved with her family to New Zealand when she was a small child, and she grew up there. She won the role of Flora McGrath—the daughter of a mute Scottish pianist who in the mid-19th century moves to New Zealand for an arranged marriage—when she responded to an open audition call; she was nine years old and had almost no previous acting experience. She moved to the United States as a teen. Paquin had a small part as the title character when she was a child in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre (1996) and a lead part in the movie Fly Away Home (1996). Paquin played Frankie Addams in a 1997 television movie adaptation of Carson McCullers’s novel The Member of the Wedding and had a minor role as the queen of Spain in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997). She played teenagers in Hurlyburly (1998), She’s All That (1999), and A Walk on the Moon (1999) and portrayed the groupie Polexia Aphrodisa in Almost Famous (2000).

In 2000 Paquin played the teenage mutant Rogue in the superhero movie X-Men, and she reprised the role in X-Men 2 (2003), X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). Her other films included Gus Van Sant’s Finding Forrester (2000), the dark satire Buffalo Soldiers (2001), Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002), and Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005). Paquin also appeared in the horror film Scream 4 (2011), Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret (2011), and The Parting Glass (2018). In 2019 she portrayed the daughter of a hit man (played by Robert De Niro) in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman; the mob drama received a theatrical release before airing on Netflix. Paquin later was cast in American Underdog, a biopic about gridiron football star Kurt Warner.

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During this time, Paquin continued to appear on television. She was nominated for both a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award for her performance in the TV movie Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007). She received another Golden Globe nomination for her starring role in the TV movie The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler (2009). Paquin portrayed the telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse in the fantasy TV series True Blood (2008–14), a role for which she earned a Golden Globe Award (2009). In 2017 she appeared in the miniseries Alias Grace, which was adapted from the novel by Margaret Atwood, and in 2019–21 she starred in the series Flack, playing a publicist working at a London firm. She later was cast in the last season (2019) of the TV series The Affair. In the true-crime miniseries A Friend of the Family (2022), Paquin played the mother of a young girl who was repeatedly kidnapped by a family friend.