environmental stuff: Personal profile

Mia Wasikowska

http://images.askmen.com/celebs/women/actress/mia-wasikowska/large_image-1.jpg

Wasikowska was born and raised in Canberra, Australia, and is the middle child of three, with an older sister, Jess, and a younger brother, Kai.Her mother, Marzena Wasikowska, is a Polish-born photographer, while her father, John Reid, is an Australian photographer and collagist. In 1998, when she was eight years old, Wasikowska and her family moved to Szczecin, Poland for a year, after her mother received a grant to produce a collection of work based on her experience of having emigrated to Australia in 1974 at the age of eleven. Completed school via the Karabar High School Distance Education Centre, a form of correspondence school based in Queanbeyan, New South Wales, Australia, just outside of Canberra, so that she could continue acting while still in High School.

Wasikowska began training as a ballerina at the age of nine, with hopes of going professional. She began dancing en pointe at thirteen, and was training 35 hours a week in addition to going to school full-time, her daily routine consisting of leaving school in the early afternoon and dancing until nine o'clock at night. A spur on her heel hampered her dancing. However, she credits ballet with improving her ability to handle her nerves in auditions.

She became inspired to break into acting after watching Holly Hunter in The Piano and Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence, in addition to the opportunity of exploring imperfections in film. Despite having no prior acting experience, Wasikowska looked up twelve Australian talent agencies on Google without your parents knowing it and contacted them all, receiving only one response; she successfully arranged a meeting following persistent callbacks.Wasikowska landed her first acting role in 2004, with a two-episode stint on the Australian soap All Saints. She had just turned fifteen when she was cast in her Australian film debut, 2006's Suburban Mayhem for which she received a nomination for a Young Actor's AFI Award. That same year, she also appeared in her first short film, Lens Love Story, in which she had no dialogue.In July 2008, after a lengthy search, Wasikowska was cast as the eponymous heroine in Tim Burton's retelling of Alice in Wonderland, alongside Johnn Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway. She sent a videotaped audition to casting directors in London, and her first live reading in Los Angeles occurred on the same day as her Evening Sun audition. After three more auditions in London – which saw her flying back and forth from Australia to England in just as many weeks – she was awarded the role. Burton cited Wasikowska's "old-soul quality" as a catalyst in casting her: "Because you’re witnessing this whole thing through her eyes, it needed somebody who can subtly portray that." Wasikowska portrayed a nineteen-year-old Alice returning to Wonderland for the first time since her youth after escaping an unwanted marriage proposal. Her affinity for the character played a part in her desire for the role, as she had read the Lewis Carroll books as a child and was a fan of Jan Švankmajer's 1988 stop-motion film Alice. She also saw Burton's version of the classic story as a chance to explore a deeper characterization of Alice, to whom she felt young women her age could relate, for which she drew on personal experiences. "Alice has a certain discomfort within herself, within society and among her peers; I [...] have definitely felt similarly about all of those things, so I could really understand her not fitting in. Alice also [is] an observer who is thinking a lot, and that's similar to how I am."

In her spare time, Wasikowska is an avid photographer, often chronicling her travels and capturing images of her film sets with a Rolleiflex camera. During production of Jane Eyre, she had a secret pocket sewn into one of her costumes in order to conceal a smaller digital camera that she used between takes. One of her on-set images, featuring Fukunaga and Jane Eyre costar Jamie Bell, was selected as a finalist in the 2011 National Photographic Portrait Prize hosted by Australia's National Portrait Gallery on 24 February 2011.

Wasikowska continues to make her home in Canberra with her family between projects. When asked by PopEater in March 2011 if she was treated like a celebrity at home, she replied, "No, I still take the rubbish out and empty the dishwasher. It's good going back for that reason." ¹

Quotes

“I’m so lucky. [My parents are] so supportive and I always say that everything I know, I know from them and from what they’ve taught me,” she explained to WWD. “I just think that I have a very interesting perspective as an actor. Whereas behind-the-scenes photography is always sort of from behind people’s back and trying to look in on the centre, when you’re an actor, you’re right in the centre and everybody’s sort of staring at you. So that’s, to me, a very interesting image.”

“It feels so alien sometimes to be looked at in that way.”

“You never choose the way that you’re raised, it’s just the way that you were raised, but you do get to a certain age where you’re in a position to question the expectations of you and the way that you’ve been formed by your surroundings,” she revealed.