Dakota Fanning

An actor at heart, Georgia-raised Fanning started her career on the stage. Her fellow actors saw potential in the five-year-old actress and suggested she get an agent. She did, and the agent sent her to L.A. for six weeks, which soon turned into months and then years.

Her face first hit the screen in a nationwide Tide commercial. She then landed guest roles in such primetime series as ER, Ally McBeal, The Practice, Malcolm in the Middle and Spin City. From television, Fanning took the leap into feature films starting with Tomcats (2001), followed by her award-winning performance as Lucy Diamond Dawson in I Am Sam (2001) opposite Sean Penn.
Fanning hasn’t stopped working since. She completed two more films, Trapped (2002) and Sweet Home Alabama (2002) for 2002, followed by Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed sci-fi mini-seres Taken and the features Uptown Girls (2003) and The Cat in the Hat (2003). In Man on Fire (2004), she stars opposite Denzel Washington as a little girl who needs a bodyguard, while in Hide and Seek (2004), she plays Robert De Niro’s motherless daughter.

Her younger sister, Elle, has followed her into the business, first appearing as a younger version of Dakota’s characters in I am Sam (2001) and Taken (2002), then branching out into films such as Daddy Day Care (2003) and Door in the Floor (2004).

Dakota has won numerous awards for her work, including a Young Artist award for her work as a horse-loving girl in Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (2005). In fact, she loved being around horses for the movie so much that she now has a horse of her own, called Goldie.