In February this year Dakota Fanning turned all of 25, but her young age is no indication of her long stint in Hollywood. She started as a child actor in stage plays in her hometown in Georgia; by the time she turned five, her professional career had begun with a television commercial, followed by a guest role in the NBC drama ER.
From five years to 25, Hannah Dakota Fanning has played a variety of roles, many of which have won her rave reviews. Her latest, ‘Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood’, is set to hit the theatres this month. She plays Lynette Alice ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, an American criminal best known as a member of the Manson girl. The film is set in 1969 Los Angeles where an ageing television actor and his stunt double embark on an odyssey to make a name for themselves in Hollywood.
Dakota first savoured Hollywood success at the age of seven, for her performance as Lucy Dawson in the film ‘I Am Sam’. She received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for the film, which established her as an actor with a long run in the industry. She was only eight when she received the nomination, making her the youngest nominee in the history of that Award. She has since played major roles in films like ‘Trapped’, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, ‘Uptown Girls’, ‘The Cat in the Hat’, ‘Man on fire’, ‘War of the Worlds’, ‘Dreamer’ and ‘Charlotte’s Web’. She also played a major role in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Taken’, the mini-TV series. She moved on to more mature roles with ‘Hounddog’, ‘The Secret Life of Bees’, ‘Coraline’, ‘The Runways’, ‘The Twilight Saga’, ‘Now is Good’, ‘Night Moves’, ‘Very Good Girls’, ‘Effie Gray’, ‘Ocean’s 8’ and ‘The Alienist’.
Born to Heather Joy (professional tennis player) and Steven Fanning (minor league baseball player), Dakota is of German, Irish, English, French, and Channel Islander descent. She was taken up by acting from the very beginning and remembers using her younger sister Elle Fanning, also an actress, in her games. Talking about her passion for acting, she is quoted to have said: “I have always wanted to act ever since I was a little girl. I would put a blanket under my shirt and pretend that I was pregnant. Then, I would go through childbirth.”
Her acting skills were noticed by the people running the playhouse where children attending the playschool were required to put up a play every week for their parents. They advised her parents to take her to an agency, and the rest, as they say, is history. From Georgia, they went all the way to Los Angeles to give that advice a try and she got her first assignment in the Tide commercial.
Dakota, who is also into fashion modeling, has been acting for two decades now, and her passion for her craft is still burning bright. Acting is what she loves to do. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I don’t think of it as work. It’s really fun for me,” she states.