Emmy Rossum had already sung at the Metropolitan Opera, performed in several languages and shared the stage with some of the world's leading opera stars before most children had successfully mastered keeping their bedrooms tidy. She then moved into film, sang her way through The Phantom of the Opera, spent nine seasons holding the spectacularly dysfunctional Gallagher family together in Shameless, recorded her own music and stepped behind the camera as a director. Apparently choosing just one branch of show business seemed unnecessarily restrictive.

Emmanuelle Grey Rossum was born on September 12, 1986, in New York City and was raised by her mother, Cheryl, a corporate photographer. Rossum's parents separated before she was born, and she grew up with her mother in Manhattan. Her introduction to professional performing came extraordinarily early and in circumstances rather grander than the average school auditorium. At seven, Rossum successfully auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera Children's Chorus, beginning a childhood immersed in one of the most demanding musical environments in the world.

During the following years, Rossum appeared in numerous productions at the Metropolitan Opera and worked alongside internationally renowned performers and conductors. She sang in operas including La Bohème, Turandot, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Carmen, among others, learning music in several languages and performing before audiences in one of the world's great opera houses. This was not simply a precocious child singing a song or two before returning to school. Rossum was learning stage discipline, musical interpretation, movement and the rather useful professional skill of performing correctly when several thousand people are watching.

Her childhood at the Met also exposed her to performers such as Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti. The experience provided a formidable musical education, but Rossum eventually became interested in acting beyond opera. By her early teens, she was pursuing screen work, making appearances on television while gradually moving away from the world in which she had begun her professional career.

Rossum appeared in television programs including Law & Order and took roles in television movies before gaining attention for her portrayal of a young Audrey Hepburn in the 2000 television film The Audrey Hepburn Story. She subsequently appeared in the Disney Channel movie Genius and received recognition for her performance in the television film Songcatcher, in which music again played an important role. Her ability to combine acting and singing was already becoming a recurring feature of her career rather than something she had left behind at the opera house.

Film roles became increasingly prominent. Rossum appeared in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River in 2003, playing Katie Markum, whose murder drives the central mystery and emotional devastation of the film. Although her screen time was limited, appearing in a drama alongside actors including Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne placed Rossum within a considerably different acting environment from her earlier television work.

The following year brought two major films and a significant leap in public recognition. Rossum appeared opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, playing Laura Chapman as enormous storms, flooding and a sudden global freeze made everybody regret not keeping an extra sweater in the car. The film became an international box-office success and introduced Rossum to a much larger audience.

Then came the role for which her childhood musical training seemed almost suspiciously well designed.

Rossum was cast as Christine Daaé in Joel Schumacher's 2004 film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera. Christine requires an actress who can convincingly portray a young performer while also handling demanding musical material. Rossum's years of classical vocal training made her an unusually natural fit. She starred opposite Gerard Butler as the Phantom and Patrick Wilson as Raoul, performing her own singing throughout the film.

Her performance earned Rossum a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. She also received other recognition for the role, and The Phantom of the Opera established her internationally as an actress whose musical ability was not some convenient line buried near the bottom of a résumé. Audiences who knew her from The Day After Tomorrow suddenly discovered that the woman fleeing catastrophic climate change could also tackle Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Rossum continued taking film roles, including appearances in Poseidon, Dragonball Evolution, Beautiful Creatures, You're Not You and Comet. The projects varied considerably in genre and reception, but Rossum resisted being confined to musicals or the polished period-drama image that Phantom might easily have imposed upon her.

Her defining television role arrived in 2011 when she became Fiona Gallagher in the American adaptation of Shameless.

Fiona was about as far from Christine Daaé as it was possible to travel without changing professions.

The eldest daughter of the chaotic Gallagher family, Fiona had effectively become the responsible adult in a Chicago household where responsibility was generally regarded as somebody else's problem. Her father, Frank Gallagher, played by William H. Macy, was an alcoholic whose talent for manipulation and self-destruction seemed practically inexhaustible. With both parents largely absent as dependable caregivers, Fiona became the person trying to keep her younger siblings fed, housed and functioning.

Rossum's performance had to carry an unusual combination of drama and comedy. Fiona could be fiercely protective, exhausted, ambitious, impulsive, loving and spectacularly self-destructive. She was not written as the saintly older sister who sacrificed everything while making flawless decisions. Fiona made plenty of terrible decisions of her own, which was precisely what made her believable.

For nine seasons, Rossum helped make Fiona one of the central figures of Shameless. The character worked multiple jobs, struggled with money, fought to keep custody of her siblings, pursued relationships that ranged from complicated to catastrophic and repeatedly attempted to build a life outside the gravitational pull of the Gallagher household.

The role also demonstrated how effectively Rossum could communicate exhaustion. Fiona often looked like somebody who had already solved six emergencies before breakfast and had just been informed that Frank was responsible for number seven.

Beneath the comedy, however, Shameless dealt with poverty, addiction, neglect, class, family responsibility and the difficult choices faced by people living with very little financial security. Fiona became central to many of those stories because she occupied the uncomfortable position between parent and sibling. She loved the Gallagher family but also increasingly understood that caring for them could consume her own life.

Rossum eventually left Shameless after its ninth season. Fiona's departure allowed the character to do something she had rarely been able to do: choose herself. She left Chicago with money and the possibility of beginning again somewhere that did not require checking what Frank Gallagher had destroyed overnight.

Her time on Shameless also led Rossum toward another part of filmmaking. She began directing episodes of television, including episodes of Shameless itself. Her directing work expanded to other series, including TNT's Animal Kingdom and the Amazon anthology Modern Love. Moving behind the camera allowed Rossum to apply decades of experience accumulated from childhood opera through television and major films to the construction of performances from the other side of the lens.

Music, meanwhile, never disappeared.

Rossum released her debut album, Inside Out, in 2007. Rather than simply recording an album of show tunes or attempting to reproduce the classical music associated with her childhood, she pursued contemporary material and songwriting. She was involved in writing the songs and used layered vocal arrangements that drew upon her extensive musical background without turning the record into an opera recital.

Her second major album project, Sentimental Journey, appeared in 2013 and took a very different approach. The record explored traditional songs and standards from earlier decades, with each selection associated with a different month of the year. The project allowed Rossum to draw upon another side of her musical interests and showed that her recording career was driven more by curiosity than by an attempt to maintain a single commercial identity.

That willingness to move between forms has characterized much of her career. Rossum can sing classical music, perform musical theater, make contemporary recordings, carry a long-running television drama, appear in large-scale Hollywood films and direct episodic television. Those abilities do not necessarily guarantee that every project will succeed, but they have allowed her to avoid becoming permanently attached to one kind of role.

In 2022, Rossum undertook another striking transformation in the Peacock limited series Angelyne. She played the mysterious Los Angeles personality famous for placing herself on billboards throughout the city long before becoming famous simply for being famous was a recognizable career plan. Rossum also served as an executive producer on the series.

The role required extensive prosthetics, makeup and physical transformation, but the greater challenge was capturing the deliberately manufactured persona Angelyne had created. The series examined questions of celebrity, identity and the difficulty of separating a public character from the private person behind it. For Rossum, who had spent years being recognized as Fiona Gallagher, it provided another opportunity to disappear beneath someone dramatically different.

Her career has also included advocacy outside acting. Rossum has spoken publicly about animal welfare and has supported charitable causes. She has been involved with organizations and campaigns concerning animals and environmental issues, reflecting interests that have remained visible alongside her entertainment work.

Rossum married writer, producer and director Sam Esmail in 2017. Esmail is best known as the creator of Mr. Robot, giving the household a considerable concentration of people who understand what happens when a television production schedule goes sideways. The couple have children together, and Rossum has generally maintained a degree of privacy around her family life.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Emmy Rossum's career is how naturally one stage seems to have prepared her for another without determining what came next. The Metropolitan Opera taught musical discipline and stagecraft. Television gave her experience in front of the camera. Films expanded her range and international visibility. The Phantom of the Opera brought acting and classical singing together. Shameless demanded years of emotionally complicated character work. Directing then allowed her to use all that accumulated experience from a different position.

Even Shameless, the role that could easily dominate any discussion of her career, represents only part of the story.

Fiona Gallagher made Rossum familiar to millions because the performance was messy, funny and human. Fiona could hold a family together one minute and make a disastrous personal choice the next. Rossum resisted making her too polished or heroic, which was particularly important in a series where almost everybody existed somewhere between questionable judgment and complete catastrophe.

Long before Fiona Gallagher was worrying about unpaid bills on Chicago's South Side, however, Emmy Rossum was a little girl standing on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

That makes the journey rather remarkable. Child opera performer. Television actress. Hollywood leading lady. Christine Daaé. Recording artist. Fiona Gallagher. Director. Producer. Some performers spend their careers trying to escape one box. Emmy Rossum appears to have misplaced the box entirely.