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Despite the rather depressing name and subject matter, we are actually excited to see director Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia this weekend. It’s been getting rave reviews, and lead actress Kirsten Dunst won Best Actress at Cannes this year for her performance. In light of the fact that Kirsten isn’t really a tabloid target these days (Lindsay seems to have stolen her thunder), it’s easy to forget that she’s been on the A-list practically since birth. The 29 year-old has been working steadily since she was just 7 years-old, and has been a major movie star since she was 12. Let’s take a look back at the road that led her to Melancholia, perhaps her most compelling role to date.
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In her earliest days, Kirsten was cast mainly in small and forgettable TV roles. In 1994, however, she stepped up into the major leagues with an unforgettable role in Interview With a Vampire opposite Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Christian Slater. How does one even get so lucky? She may have been too young to appreciate just how huge a coup this was for her career, but she wasn’t too young to be thrust into sudden worldwide fame.
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From Interview With a Vampire, Kirsten landed other big screen roles in films like Little Women and Jumanji.
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From 1995-1998, Kirsten continued to work quietly as she finished out her high school career in Los Angeles. But in 1999, Kirsten hit the big screen once again as Lux Lisbon in Sofia Coppola’s much buzzed-about directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides. The dark nature of the story, based on a book by the same name, created quite the controversy and earned Kirsten, the film’s star, a bit of a cult following.
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The very next year, she starred in Bring It On, another movie that garnered a cult following of sorts (and several sequels).
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After hanging up her pom-poms, Kirsten managed to make a hit out of indie film Crazy/Beautiful, in which she plays a troubled teenager who’s fallen in love with a good boy from the other side of the tracks. The movie, strikingly similar to Drew Barrymore’s Mad Love, which was released the same year, was beloved by angsty teenaged girls everywhere in 2001.
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What followed was a string of major movie roles in blockbusters such as Spider-Man (and Spider-Man 2)…
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…indie films like Mona Lisa Smile and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind…
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…Wimbeldon and Elizabethtown…
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And, most recently of note, Marie Antoinette, another film by the director Kirsten had first worked with seven years earlier — Sofia Coppola.
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Marie Antoinette came out in 2006. In the years following the release, there was a notable pause in Kirsten’s career. In 2008, she checked herself into a rehab center to deal with depression, and maintained a low profile after she checked herself out a few months later. And though she starred in All Good Things with Ryan Gosling last year, the film was not a success and went in and out of theaters quickly.
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Which leads us to this weekend, and the wide release of the highly acclaimed Cannes favorite Melancholia. Kind of an appropriate title choice given what Kirsten’s been going through in recent years, but she’s actually said that the film reinvigorated her, and that the break in acting that led up to it was a necessary one.
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We’re excited to see the film, which is about how relationships and people are affected as a new planet threatens to collide with Earth and end all life. Pretty heavy, huh?
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Luckily, Kirsten’s got some lighter fare to look forward to as well — we can’t wait to see her in Bachlorette alongside Isla Fisher and dreamboat James Marsden next year. And just think…this insanely accomplished megawatt star is not even 30 years-old yet. We can’t wait to see what she does next, especially since we know it (mercifully) wont have anything to do with the tabloids.
