Brie Larson was born Brianne Sidonie Desaulniers on October 1, 1989, in Sacramento, California, and began pursuing acting while remarkably young. Her parents were chiropractors, and Larson spent her earliest years being homeschooled alongside her younger sister. She became fascinated with performing as a child and demonstrated sufficient determination that acting quickly developed from childhood enthusiasm into a genuine professional ambition. Her eventual career would encompass television, independent film, comedy, drama, music, directing and one of the largest superhero franchises in cinema history.

Larson's interest in acting led her to the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where she became one of the youngest students admitted to its training program. Her family circumstances changed during her childhood when her parents separated, after which Larson moved with her mother and sister to Los Angeles. Money was limited and their living arrangements were modest, but Los Angeles placed her considerably closer to the auditions and professional opportunities required to turn her ambitions into employment.

Her professional surname also came from this period. "Desaulniers" proved difficult for people to pronounce and remember, so she adopted Larson as her stage name. She has explained that the name was partly inspired by Kirsten Larson, an American Girl doll she owned as a child, as well as a family name. It was an appropriately practical bit of early career management: Hollywood has enough difficulty remembering names even when everyone can pronounce them.

Larson's earliest professional work included appearances in comedy sketches and television. As a child she appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in recurring comedy segments, followed by roles in television productions including To Have & to Hold, Touched by an Angel and Popular. She later became a regular on the sitcom Raising Dad, starring Bob Saget, Kat Dennings and Jerry Adler. Larson played Emily Stewart, one of the daughters being raised by Saget's widowed character. The series lasted a single season, but it provided the young performer with sustained experience working on a network television production.

Acting was not Larson's only early ambition. During her teenage years, she pursued a recording career and released the pop album Finally Out of P.E. in 2005. The title reflected her experiences with physical education, a school subject unlikely to have realized it was destined to become part of pop-music history. Larson wrote or co-wrote material for the album and toured in support of her music, but the record did not become a major commercial success. Rather than ending her career, the experience became one of several interesting detours before acting firmly established itself as her principal profession.

Film roles gradually became more substantial. Larson appeared in 13 Going on 30 and the motocross comedy Motocross Kids, followed by roles in Hoot and other productions. She later played Kate Gregson on the Showtime series United States of Tara, starring Toni Collette as a woman living with dissociative identity disorder. Larson's character was Tara's rebellious teenage daughter, and the series gave her considerably richer material than many of her earlier television jobs. She appeared throughout the show's three-season run and continued building a reputation as an actress capable of moving easily between comedy and serious drama.

Larson also became part of the wonderfully strange ensemble of Edgar Wright's 2010 film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. She played Envy Adams, the successful musician and former girlfriend of Michael Cera's Scott Pilgrim. As the lead singer of the fictional band Clash at Demonhead, Larson performed the song "Black Sheep" in the film, unexpectedly reconnecting her acting career with the musical ambitions of her teenage years. The movie initially produced relatively modest box-office results but subsequently developed a devoted following, and Larson's performance as the cool, intimidating Envy became one of her best-remembered early film roles.

Comedy continued with appearances in 21 Jump Street and Don Jon, but a much smaller independent film provided Larson with the role that substantially changed perceptions of her as an actress. In Short Term 12, released in 2013 and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, she played Grace Howard, a supervisor at a residential group home for troubled teenagers. Grace is compassionate and highly capable at work while privately carrying unresolved trauma of her own.

Short Term 12 gave Larson an emotionally complex leading role without the machinery of a major studio production around her. Her performance received widespread critical praise and numerous awards from critics' organizations and film festivals. The movie also became notable for a cast that included several performers whose careers would subsequently rise considerably, including Lakeith Stanfield, Rami Malek, Kaitlyn Dever and Stephanie Beatriz. For Larson, the film demonstrated that she could carry a serious drama and became an important bridge between her earlier supporting work and the roles that followed.

That breakthrough led ultimately to Room, the 2015 adaptation of Emma Donoghue's novel directed by Lenny Abrahamson. Larson played Joy "Ma" Newsome, a young woman held captive for years in a small garden shed with her son Jack, played by Jacob Tremblay. The first portion of the film takes place within their confinement, while the story later explores their escape and the psychological difficulty of returning to a world from which Joy has been isolated.

The role required Larson to portray both the extreme circumstances of captivity and the complicated aftermath of survival. Much of the film depends upon the relationship between Joy and Jack, with Joy attempting to create a functioning world for her son inside an extraordinarily restricted physical space. Larson's performance avoided turning the character into a simple symbol of suffering, instead portraying anger, exhaustion, love, fear and the difficulties of recovering after prolonged trauma.

Her work in Room earned Larson the Academy Award for Best Actress. She also received the Golden Globe, BAFTA Award, Critics' Choice Award and Screen Actors Guild Award for the performance, completing an extraordinary awards-season run. After years of child acting, television work, pop music, supporting parts and independent films, Larson had become an Oscar-winning leading actress.

Her career expanded rapidly afterward. She appeared in Ben Wheatley's action comedy Free Fire and starred in The Glass Castle, based on Jeannette Walls' memoir, opposite Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts. Larson also appeared in Kong: Skull Island as photojournalist Mason Weaver, joining Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman on an expedition to an island where the local wildlife rather decisively objects to unexpected visitors. The film became a major international success and gave Larson significant experience with the effects-heavy filmmaking that would soon become an even larger part of her career.

Larson also moved behind the camera. She directed and starred in Unicorn Store, playing Kit, a frustrated young artist who receives a mysterious invitation offering her the opportunity to acquire a unicorn. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival before later being released by Netflix. Larson had previously directed short films, but Unicorn Store marked her feature directorial debut and demonstrated her interest in filmmaking beyond acting.

Then the Marvel Cinematic Universe came calling.

Larson was cast as Carol Danvers, better known as Captain Marvel, one of the most powerful superheroes in the Marvel universe. She made her full debut in 2019's Captain Marvel, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Set largely during the 1990s, the film follows Danvers as she attempts to understand her forgotten past while caught in a conflict involving the Kree and Skrulls. Samuel L. Jackson appeared as a digitally de-aged Nick Fury, while the supporting cast included Jude Law, Lashana Lynch, Ben Mendelsohn and Annette Bening.

Captain Marvel possesses an assortment of abilities that make most conventional superhero equipment seem rather unnecessary. She can fly, absorb and manipulate energy, demonstrate extraordinary strength and survive conditions that would considerably inconvenience ordinary people. Larson's Carol Danvers combined these powers with the character's history as a U.S. Air Force pilot and her gradual discovery that much of what she believed about herself had been manipulated.

Captain Marvel became a major worldwide box-office success and made Larson the first woman to headline a Marvel Cinematic Universe film as its sole title superhero. She returned almost immediately in Avengers: Endgame, joining the surviving Avengers in their effort to reverse the devastation caused by Thanos. Captain Marvel's arrival during the final battle demonstrated precisely why the character had been kept rather busy elsewhere in the universe: she flew straight through Thanos' enormous warship and destroyed it. Doors, apparently, are optional when you are Captain Marvel.

Larson later reprised Carol Danvers in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel before returning as one of the leads in 2023's The Marvels. The film brought Captain Marvel together with Iman Vellani's Kamala Khan and Teyonah Parris' Monica Rambeau. Their powers become entangled, causing the three women to switch locations whenever they use them simultaneously and producing the sort of logistical inconvenience rarely covered during superhero training.

Outside Marvel, Larson joined another enormous franchise with Fast X in 2023, playing Tess, the daughter of Mr. Nobody and an ally of Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto. Appearing in both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Fast & Furious franchise placed Larson in the unusual position of inhabiting two cinematic worlds where the ordinary laws of physics are generally treated as polite suggestions.

Television provided another acclaimed dramatic role with the Apple TV+ series Lessons in Chemistry, based on Bonnie Garmus' bestselling novel. Larson played Elizabeth Zott, a gifted chemist in the 1950s and early 1960s whose scientific ambitions collide with the entrenched sexism of her profession. Circumstances eventually lead Elizabeth to become the host of a television cooking program, which she uses to teach viewers considerably more than recipes. Larson also served as an executive producer on the series.

Her performance in Lessons in Chemistry earned major awards recognition, including Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations. The project returned Larson to the kind of character-driven dramatic material that had established her with Short Term 12 and Room, while allowing her to combine drama with moments of humor and social commentary.

Larson has also used her public profile to advocate for greater representation within the entertainment industry. She has spoken about gender equality and the need for greater diversity among film critics and entertainment journalists, particularly emphasizing opportunities for critics from underrepresented backgrounds. Her advocacy has sometimes generated debate, but it reflects a willingness to use the influence accompanying major Hollywood success to address the industry in which she works.

The range of Brie Larson's career can be easy to overlook because Captain Marvel is such an enormous cultural presence. Long before she could fire photon blasts from her hands, Larson had been a child comedian, sitcom performer, teenage recording artist and independent-film actress. Short Term 12 established her dramatic abilities, Room brought an Academy Award, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe transformed her into an international franchise star.

It is a career that has followed almost no predictable route. Brie Larson went from The Tonight Show comedy sketches to a pop album, from Scott Pilgrim to an Oscar, from a tiny room in an independent drama to flying through outer space as one of Marvel's most powerful heroes. Along the way she added directing, producing and television to the list. For someone whose album was once called Finally Out of P.E., she eventually became remarkably difficult to keep on the ground.