1983-present
Latest News: Greta Gerwig Seeks Her First Oscar Win for Barbie
In one of the year’s most discussed Oscar snubs, Greta Gerwig isn’t nominated for Best Director at the 2024 Academy Awards. But the Barbie writer-director is still competing for a trophy at the March 10 ceremony. Gerwig picked up her second Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay (and fourth overall) for the billion-dollar blockbuster, which she cowrote with her husband, Noah Baumbach. In total, Barbie earned eight nominations, including Best Picture.
“A friend’s mom said to me, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t get nominated,’” Gerwig told Time recently in her first comments about this year’s Academy Award nominees. “I said, ‘But I did. I got an Oscar nomination.’ She was like, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful for you!’ I was like, ‘I know!’”
Gerwig and Baumbach were similarly nominated for their script at the 2024 Golden Globes, though Justine Triet and Arthur Harari won the category for Triet’s acclaimed movie Anatomy of a Fall. At the Oscars, the writing awards are split by original and adapted screenplays, with Anatomy of a Fall competing in the former and Barbie in the latter. Instead, Gerwig and Baumbach face Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, and Tony McNamara’s Poor Things. A win would mark Gerwig’s first Academy Award.
Who Is Greta Gerwig?
Greta Gerwig is a director, screenwriter, and actor. She began her career primarily focused up on acting, particularly in independent films, and earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in Frances Ha. Her solo directorial debut, 2017’s Lady Bird, saw rave reviews and led to her Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. After earning praise for her movie adaptation of Little Women, Gerwig achieved her greatest box-office success with Barbie, 2023’s highest-grossing movie that also set a new earning record among women-directed movies. Gerwig regularly collaborates with her husband and fellow filmmaker Noah Baumbach.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Greta Celeste Gerwig
BORN: August 4, 1983
BIRTHPLACE: Sacramento, California
SPOUSE: Noah Baumbach (2023-present)
CHILDREN: Harold and another son
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo
Early Life
Greta Celeste Gerwig was born on August 4, 1983, in Sacramento, California. Her father, Gordon, worked for a credit union, and her mother, Christine, was a nurse. In her youth, Gerwig studied ballet, but she quit in part because she was considered too tall (she is now 5-foot-9). Her mother arranged for her to study other forms of dance, including jazz, tap, modern, and hip-hop.
Gerwig was also a competitive fencer, ranking third in the state of California at one point. Although raised Unitarian Universalist, she attended an all-girls Catholic high school, in part, because it offered her the flexibility she needed to attend tournaments. The high costs led to Gerwig dropping the sport, but she still fences occasionally.
In high school, Gerwig was involved in theater, an interest she also pursued in college. She attended Barnard College at Columbia University in New York City, where she studied English and philosophy before graduating in 2006. Her college roommate was future Saturday Night Live cast member Kate McKinnon. The two performed in an improv group together and made “really wonderfully strange musicals” together. Gerwig also wrote and acted in plays.
Movies Greta Gerwig Has Acted In
Gerwig sought to become a playwright but after getting rejected from MFA programs in playwriting, she instead focused primarily on acting. She made her film debut while still in college, with a small part in Joe Swanberg’s LOL (2006). This marked her first foray into the “mumblecore” subgenre, notable for its micro-budget films in naturalistic settings with improvised dialogue and shaky cameras. She took bigger parts in mumblecore films like Baghead (2008) and Yeast (2008) and both starred in and co-wrote the films Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and Nights and Weekends (2008), the latter of which she also co-directed with Joe Swanberg.
Given the pay scale of these films, Gerwig had to work multiple jobs, including as a tutor and nanny, to make ends meet. But she reached the next level of her career when director Noah Baumbach cast her in Greenberg (2010), which starred Ben Stiller. This was the first in a number of future collaborations between Gerwig and Baumbach, who later married.
In 2011, she co-starred in a remake of Arthur alongside Russell Brand and had a role in No Strings Attached, starring Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman. Gerwig also appeared in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress and Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love, both released in 2012.
Frances Ha
Gerwig and Baumbach cowrote the film Frances Ha (2013), in which Gerwig starred as a struggling dancer in New York City who copes with a number of complicated relationships and career setbacks. Gerwig received widespread acclaim for the performance. Sight & Sound magazine praised “the thoughtfulness and commitment of Gerwig’s performance in its shifts from chaotic exuberance to rigorous rehearsal,” and The Independent wrote that “Gerwig superbly incarnates the contradictions of this insecure woman.” Additionally, she received a Best Actress Golden Globe nomination for the role.
Mistress America and Beyond
Gerwig and Baumbach also cowrote Mistress America (2015), with Gerwig again in the starring role. However, Gerwig discovered that her contribution to these shared projects can be undervalued. As she told The New York Times in 2017, “Something that used to really hurt me is, people would say, ‘Did you help write the script?’ And I’d say: ‘I cowrote it. I didn’t “help” to write it.’ It used to make my blood rise.”
Although Gerwig didn’t become an A-list actor, she remained busy. In 2014, Gerwig landed the starring role in the CBS pilot How I Met Your Dad, from the creators of the popular series How I Met Your Mother. However, the pilot wasn’t picked up. That year, she was also in The Humbling with Al Pacino. Gerwig was particularly busy leading up to 2016 when she took on roles in Rebecca Miller’s Maggie’s Plan, Jackie about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and 20th Century Women.
Gerwig hasn’t given up acting but intends to focus on writing and directing. At the Women in Entertainment Summit in 2017, she noted, “I want to produce women’s films, because I think women want to see films made by people who know what they’re talking about, what the experience is.”
Movies Greta Gerwig Has Directed: Barbie, Little Women, and Lady Bird
To date, Gerwig has directed three movies: Lady Bird (2017), Little Women (2019), and Barbie (2023). She holds the record for highest-grossing movie directed by a woman for Barbie.
Directorial Breakthrough with Lady Bird
Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird is about a year in the life of a high school senior in Sacramento who has dubbed herself “Lady Bird” and is trying to find her place in the world. The movie not only relates a coming-of-age tale with a female protagonist (played by Saoirse Ronan), it also showcases the love between a daughter and her mother (played by Laurie Metcalf) instead of focusing on the protagonist’s romantic pairings. The working title was Mothers and Daughters.
Lady Bird was lauded when it premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September 2017. According to Rotten Tomatoes, it was given 196 positive reviews in a row (the first negative one arrived that December), making it the record-holder for the most “fresh” reviews. The movie went on to earn a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy, before garnering five Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.
There are parallels between the lives of Gerwig and Lady Bird: Both grew up in Sacramento and attended an all-girls Catholic high school, and both sets of their parents had similar careers. However, Gerwig draws a line between herself and her character. As she explained in an interview with WTOP radio: “I was nothing like Lady Bird. I never made anyone call me by a different name. I was very much more of a rule follower and gold-star getter. But the core of the movie, the sort of deep, complicated love of a family and a hometown, that’s all really close to my heart.”
Even though Lady Bird became a success, creating it wasn’t always a straightforward process. It took Gerwig years to write the script, which reached 350 pages at one point. She finished it in 2015 but then faced speed bumps in getting financing for the film. The mother-daughter relationship is important, and one Gerwig felt had been relatively unexplored in cinema, but male financiers who didn’t have sisters or daughters sometimes didn’t understand the relationship dynamics. Gerwig was also so committed to getting the rights to songs like Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” and the Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me” that she wrote the songwriters letters explaining what their music had meant to her while growing up.
Little Women
Gerwig’s follow-up writing-directing project, an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 19th century masterpiece Little Women, also wowed critics upon its arrival in December 2019. Featuring Lady Bird star Saoirse Ronan, with a surrounding cast that includes Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Timothée Chalamet, and Meryl Streep, the movie earned praise for its faithfulness to the complex family dynamics that infuses the novel, as well as its director’s command of the narrative through chronological reshuffling. The film earned six Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, and acting nods for Ronan and Pugh. It won the Oscar for Best Costume Design.
Barbie
Gerwig next directed Barbie (2023), a fantasy comedy she co-wrote with her creative partner and husband Noah Baumbach that starred Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken. While Mattel, the company behind the famous fashion icon, wanted a summer blockbuster to begin a series of brand-extension films, Gerwig aspired to subvert audience expectations and provide a commentary on contemporary life. The screenplay drew inspiration from several unlikely sources, such as the Bible’s story of Adam and Eve and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as films like Powell and Pressburger’s Stairway to Heaven (1946), Vincent Minelli’s An American in Paris (1951), and Jacques Tati’s Mon Uncle (1958).
Barbie grossed $356 million globally in it opening weekend, marking the biggest debut ever for a film directed by a woman. The movie was released the same day as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer about nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the anticipation and social media chatter about the so-called “Barbenheimer” double feature resulted in the fourth-biggest box office weekend of all-time. Barbie ultimately grossed more than $1.4 billion in ticket sales worldwide, topping all other 2023 movie releases. In the process, Gerwig smashed the earning record for a female-directed movie in less than three weeks. Patty Jenkins previously held that honor for Wonder Woman (2017), which grossed $822 million.
At the 2024 Golden Globes, Barbie won Cinematic and Box Office Achievement, a brand new award, and Best Original Song for Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” Gerwig was personally nominated for two Golden Globes, Best Director and Best Screenplay, and she later earned her fourth Oscar nod. She and Baumbach are nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the movie is competing for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards in March 2024. That Gerwig isn’t among the Best Director nominees is one of the year’s most discussed Oscar snubs. Elsewhere, Time magazine named her one of its 2024 Women of the Year.
Chronicles of Narnia
Currently, Gerwig is working to adapt the first book in the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis for Netflix. It’s part of a two-movie deal for the series between the director and the streaming giant.
Husband Noah Baumbach and Children
Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, her regular professional collaborator, became a romantic couple after Baumbach split up with first wife, actor Jennifer Jason Leigh. After 12 years together, Gerwig and Baumbach got married. They went public with their marriage in December 2023.
The couple has two kids together. Their son Harold was born in March 2019, and they had a second boy in 2023. Although Gerwig had publicly revealed her second pregnancy, the couple has kept a lid on their newest child. It wasn’t until months after their younger son’s birth that Gerwig shared he had been born in a July 2023 Elle UK article. The couple has also not released his name to the public.
Baumbach also shares a son named Rohmer with Leigh.
Quotes
- I’m not, nor have I ever been, cool. That idea is out there because I’ve done so many indie films. But I’m much more of a musical-theater kid—I know every word to Starlight Express and Cats.
- I was nothing like Lady Bird. I never made anyone call me by a different name. I was very much more of a rule follower and gold-star getter.
- It’s never not astonishing to me that somebody gives you money to make a movie.
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Colin McEvoy joined the Biography.com staff in 2023, and before that had spent 16 years as a journalist, writer, and communications professional. He is the author of two true crime books: Love Me or Else and Fatal Jealousy. He is also an avid film buff, reader, and lover of great stories.
