<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Something about the fall blowing in on raw October rains had made Scarlett Johansson paint her nails a dark, untender red. She&amp;#039;d just switched her conditioner, too, but didn&amp;#039;t count that as an instinctual response to the change of season. In five weeks she would turn 21, and her 12-year career as one of Hollywood&amp;#039;s most gifted and precociously mature minors would officially expire. If her twin brother, Hunter, could come down from college in Vermont, she was envisioning a small party, mostly family, in New York.   For the moment, having made seven movies since her 2003 breakout with Lost in Translation and Girl With a Pearl Earring, she was eager to hibernate. Go to bed at midnight and get up at 10 a.m. Pick out curtains. Bake apple pies. Linger in the novelty of the unself-conscious life, far from film sets, awards-show gauntlets, and media busybodies fishing for updates on her romance with Josh Hartnett. And far from paparazzi. Last summer a locust swarm of shutterbugs in SUVs chased her when she was driving near Disneyland and inadvertently caused her to sideswipe another car, which obliged her to dial 911, which generated some Pinter-esque dialogue with the dispatcher, a transcript of which was breathlessly rushed into print by the Associated Press....  From such farce come the daydreams of a counterlife. &amp;quot;If I weren&amp;#039;t making movies, I&amp;#039;d be an archaeologist, looking for fossils,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I love ancient Egypt.&amp;quot; The idea hung in the air a moment. Then she rolled her eyes and gave a sardonic laugh that sounded like someone tearing up an application to graduate school. &amp;quot;Cut to me in 120-degree heat, picking at a rock with a four-inch needle. Forget that! I love making movies.&amp;quot;  Last spring she made her Hollywood action debut starring with Ewan McGregor in The Island. &amp;quot;The set was an old Boeing warehouse, and I&amp;#039;d walk through at night thinking, Man, this is great; this is a once in a lifetime chance, and I get to do it. The excitement of it made me feel like a little girl again.&amp;quot;  Our window table in the Soho House restaurant in Manhattan was not far from her apartment in the West Village. Most of the swell lunch crowd had emptied out. She ordered a half iced tea, half lemonade. &amp;quot;If I ask for an Arnold Palmer in New York, nobody seems to know what it is.&amp;quot;  The better to cultivate her anonymity and ward off the rain, Johansson was dressed in brown boots, blue jeans, and a gray hooded sweatshirt. From a distance\u2014a very great distance\u2014she could have passed for one of the construction workers turning the area&amp;#039;s old lofts and meat lockers into insanely priced condominiums. Up close, say within a few thousand yards, it was impossible to mistake an actress in the high season of her beauty, no little girl but a woman with Grand Prix curves, a soign\u00E9 throat (adorned this afternoon with a necklace luxuriating in her d\u00E9colletage), wide aquamarine eyes, fashion cheekbones, and those famously plush lips that some of the finest practitioners of celebrity journalism have herniated themselves trying to describe.  Peripheral as such endowments may be to her uncommon ability to express emotional states, they sure sauce up her latest movie, Woody Allen&amp;#039;s adultery drama Match Point. Since her arrival as an A-list star, Johansson has had remarkably little trouble working both sides of the mind-body problem in Hollywood, where it often seems you can be smart but not sexy or sexy but not smart. On magazine covers and in television appearances, she is a ripe peach in Prada boots and messy bedroom blow-outs, all her secondary-sex characteristics at full throttle. But in the films that made her famous, her sexuality has been conspicuous for its restraint; she&amp;#039;s a master of unspoken ardor. In Lost in Translation she brimmed with longing for a man old enough to be her father but was so modest that director Sofia Coppola had to talk her into wearing the see-through underpants that show her keister at the beginning of the movie. Despite being bundled in the frumpy outfit of a seventeenth-century Dutch maid in Girl With a Pearl Earring, Johansson was able to convey the proprietary violence of desire when her ear was pierced in one of the movie&amp;#039;s most sexually resonant scenes. In both films, the sultry air of erotic tension comes from passion checked by intellect, circumstance, or station.  Her role in Match Point is a bodice-ripping departure. Set in London, where it was shot, the film features a mostly British cast. Johansson plays the femme fatale Nola Rice, a struggling American actress who holds nothing back and whose affair with a socially ambitious ex-tennis pro ends like a bad night in the Bronx. Nola&amp;#039;s opening line after a triumph at the ping-pong table is &amp;quot;So who&amp;#039;s my next victim?&amp;quot; In Johansson&amp;#039;s dusky alto, there&amp;#039;s so much spin on the serve you want to jump out of your seat and help her freshen her lip gloss. Allen was delighted enough with her performance that he cast her in his next project, a comedy, again shot in London.  &amp;quot;When he gave me the new script he said, &amp;#039;If anything is too horrible to say, just change it,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Johansson says. &amp;quot;I was surprised. What he really seemed focused on was the way the characters looked. He&amp;#039;d see little differences in costumes that I don&amp;#039;t think anybody would notice. Every film I do, I know exactly what I want to look like, but Woody wanted to pick the dresses I wore. If we ever have to make any awards-show appearances, I told him he could pick my dress. He seemed to expect that he would be doing that anyway.&amp;quot;  Given her lack of familiarity with failure, the part of a struggling actress is probably more of a stretch for Johansson than any of her other roles except, one would think, Mindy the Mermaid, whom she voiced in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004). She&amp;#039;s had some training in Method acting but is pretty much self-taught. &amp;quot;I learned early on how to manipulate my emotions,&amp;quot; she said as the waiter arrived with her lemonade-tea. She took a sip from a long black straw. &amp;quot;As far back as I can remember, I&amp;#039;ve been hyperaware of human behavior and able to mimic it somehow. That&amp;#039;s why I can do what I do. But if you look beyond the idea of celebrity, it&amp;#039;s a strange thing that actors do. You put yourself in these emotionally vulnerable states. I don&amp;#039;t know if it&amp;#039;s healthy, but I feel good when it&amp;#039;s right. It&amp;#039;s such a weird, great rush when you really nail it.&amp;quot;  Johansson made her film debut at age nine in Rob Reiner&amp;#039;s North, then worked supporting parts in five movies, drawing some notice in 1996 for Manny &amp;amp;amp; Lo, in which she played the younger of two sisters running away from a foster home. What really put her on casting agent maps was her exquisitely understated performance as Grace MacLean, the young teenager who loses her right leg in a horse-riding accident in Robert Redford&amp;#039;s 1998 film The Horse Whisperer.  &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t know until The Horse Whisperer what was authentic and what wasn&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I just knew how I felt, and I just reacted. I was a kid. It&amp;#039;s probably the best way to act because it&amp;#039;s completely instinctive. I think every actor is always trying to get back to some kind of original innocence.&amp;quot;  Johansson is a city kid, born and raised in New York, though now she has a house in Los Angeles, with a garden full of cacti. In addition to her brother Hunter, whom she beat out of the womb by three minutes, she has an older sister, Vanessa, also an actress, and an older brother, Adrian, a Manhattan real estate broker. Her father, Karsten, was born in Denmark and lives and works in New York as an architect and contractor. When the kids were young, her mother, Melanie, took care of the home; now she is Johansson&amp;#039;s manager and a producer in Los Angeles.  From the get-go Johansson shared her mother&amp;#039;s enthusiasm for Broadway shows and also displayed an early fervor for performing. At age eight she debuted in an off-Broadway play called Sophistry starring Ethan Hawke. But she quickly discovered that she preferred film. While acting in roughly a movie a year, she attended the Professional Children&amp;#039;s School in Manhattan, which is tailored to broadening the minds of working young dancers, actors, and musicians. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d go off to do a movie the way some kids go off to camp,&amp;quot; she said.  Then when she was 13, her parents split up. &amp;quot;At the time it was difficult to understand why they did certain things,&amp;quot; she recalled. &amp;quot;But I see them differently now. I still want to meet their expectations as a person of a certain kind of decency.&amp;quot;  The guardedness that had been in her eyes when we sat down ebbed over the course of the afternoon. She tore open some packets of crystallized brown sugar and dumped them on the table and then, like a kid in a sandbox, began to scrape and push them around with the black straw, which she had wrapped around her thumb, obscuring all but the tip of the brilliant nail. &amp;quot;I think this looks like a red blood cell,&amp;quot; she said. She added more sugar and began to develop the figure.   So much has been written about what people take to be her wise-before-her-time maturity. Her mother once described her as an old soul, and Robert Redford famously remarked that she was &amp;quot;13 going on 30.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s hard to square that persona with the woman who celebrated her twentieth birthday at Disneyland, one of her favorite places, or whose favorite movie is Willy Wonka &amp;amp;amp; the Chocolate Factory. At one point when she was talking about her acting\u2014&amp;quot;Work is the one thing I can do. It&amp;#039;s constant; it&amp;#039;s the one thing I can count on&amp;quot;\u2014I found myself wondering if rocketing young actresses&amp;#039; careers are always compensations, powered by the fuel of some primal disappointment. In Johansson&amp;#039;s case, you had to wonder if not just her drive and appetite for work reflected the early disillusionment of her parents&amp;#039; separation and eventual divorce but also her air of self-possession, her faculty for incisive silences and plain speaking, with its implicit disdain for the white lies of adults. And her precocious balance and independence\u2014born of necessity when grown-ups pulled the rug out from under her? In the end it is much more preferable to choose to live up to your parents&amp;#039; expectations than to feel compelled to by incomprehensible psychological pressures. And as ever, to come of age in some way means to deliver one&amp;#039;s self from the authority that lingers in the mythic figments of Mom and Dad. Plainly that might have been a job Johansson knocked off years ago, making her one of those paradoxical characters Dylan described who were so much older then that they&amp;#039;re younger than that now. &amp;quot;Kids are so sophisticated,&amp;quot; Johansson said. &amp;quot;Adults are always underestimating them. The person you are at 12 or 13 is the person you always are.&amp;quot;  While I was praying to God this wasn&amp;#039;t true, she picked up the black straw. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s pretty, isn&amp;#039;t it?&amp;quot; she said, nodding down at the paper on the table. Before us lay her finest creation of the afternoon: an intricately inlaid brown and white fleur-de-lis fashioned of sweet crystals and dust. Indeed it was pretty, and thinking I would have a few moments to admire the pattern, I gasped when her hand shot out and whisked it away, as quick as a striking snake.  She smiled like a goddess with all the time in the world. &amp;quot;I can always make another,&amp;quot; she said. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a9232/the-smart-bomb-19457/>