Anna Paquin

Anna Paquin was born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1982 but moved with her family to her mother’s native home of New Zealand when she was only four. She is the youngest of three and has an older brother called Andrew and an older sister called Katya.

Anna attended the Raphael House Rudolph Steiner School until she was about nine and then while in New Zealand she attended Hutt Intermediate School. Moving on to secondary education at Wellington Girls’ College but moved with her mother to Los Angeles with her mother following her parents divorce in 1995 and attained her high school diploma at Windward School. She graduated from Windward School in 2000 and went on to study at Colombia University. However, she only managed a year there before her acting career took over and she decided to take a leave of absence to concentrate on acting.

Her acting career happened by accident. In New Zealand in 1991, director Jane Campion was looking for a little girl to play an important role in an upcoming film called The Piano. A newspaper ad was placed asking for girls who were interested to come along to an open audition. It was actually Anna’s sister, Katya who read the ad and went to the audition along with a friend to try out for the part. With nothing better to do, Anna tagged along even though her only previous experience of acting was playing a skunk in a school play. Jane Campion though was impressed with her performance and at nine years old, Anna Paquin was cast as Flora McGrath in the film after she was chosen from over 5000 applicants. As it turned out, Jane Campion wasn’t the only one to be impressed with Anna’s performance as she became the second youngest recipient of an oscar when she won Best Supporting Actress at the age of eleven.

Anna added her name to the books at the William Morris agency but fully intended not to pursue an acting career, but the offers kept coming in, and Anna kept turning them down. However, by 1996 she started to accept a few and appeared in Jane Eyre and Fly Away Home in that year. Later, she also had roles in Amistad, A Walk on the Moon, Hurlyburly, Almost Famous and She’s All That.

In 2000 Anna Paquin hit the big time again when she appeared as Rogue in the Marvel Comics movie X-Men. She also appeared as the same character in the sequel X2 in 2003 and the third film in the franchise X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006.

Following a number of other roles and Emmy Award nomination in 2007, Anna landed the role of Sookie Stackhouse in HBO’s True Blood in 2008, her first television role.

In 2009 she announced her engagement to Stephen Moyer, her co-star in True Blood and at a private ceremony in Malibu, California, they married on 21st August 2010. On 17th April 2012, it was announed that she is expecting her first child with Moyer. The baby is expected in the fall of 2012.