Saoirse Una Ronan was born in The Bronx, New York, to Irish parents, Monica Ronan née Brennan and actor, Paul Ronan. When Saoirse was three, the family moved back to Dublin. Saoirse grew up in Dublin and briefly in Co Carlow before moving back to Dublin with her parents.
Ronan made her acting debut in 2003 with the Irish medical drama series The Clinic and her film debut in the romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007). Her breakthrough came with the part of a precocious teenager in Atonement (2007), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Ronan followed this with starring roles of a murdered girl seeking closure in The Lovely Bones (2009) and a teenage assassin in Hanna (2011), and the supporting part of a baker in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). She has received critical acclaim for playing a homesick Irish immigrant in 1950s New York in Brooklyn (2015), the eponymous high school senior in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017), and Jo March in Gerwig’s Little Women (2019). Ronan was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for all three performances, and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for Lady Bird.
On stage, Ronan portrayed Abigail Williams in the 2016 Broadway revival of The Crucible. In the same year, she was featured by Forbes in two of their 30 Under 30 lists. Ronan has spoken out about social and political issues of Ireland.
Ronan starred in the music video for the Ed Sheeran ‘Galway Girl’ (2017) as the titular character. Ronan featured alongside Annette Bening in a film adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull in May 2018. She also starred as Mary Stuart in the period drama Mary Queen of Scots, co-starring Margot Robbie as Elizabeth I of England.
Ronan holds dual Irish and American citizenship. She lives in Greystones, Co Wicklow.
She is an ambassador for the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. She is also part of an organisation called ‘Home Sweet Home’, led by celebrities like Hozier and Glen Hansard. In 2016, this organisation illegally took over an office building in Dublin to house 31 homeless families. In 2018, she was featured in Maxim’s “Hot 100” list and was named among the best American actors under 30 by IndieWire. Also that year, Calvin Klein appointed her and Lupita Nyong’o as the face of Raf Simons’ first fragrance for the company, named Women. She was ranked one of the best dressed women in 2018 by fashion website Net-a-Porter.
Image | Imbd
