New Zealander Anna Paquin made her stage bow in the coveted role of a skunk in a grade school play. After attracting attention for her work in a TV commercial, Paquin was selected from some 5,000 applicants to portray Holly Hunter's precocious daughter in director Jane Campion's dour period piece The Piano. The film was completed in 1992 when Paquin was nine. She kept busy for the next year or so in a series of American TV ads for a computer company, portraying an androgynous "young DaVinci" type. In 1994, an amazed 11-year-old Paquin rushed on the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion to accept the best supporting actress award for her performance in The Piano. Paquin played her first adult role in Hurly Burly (1998).
Anna Paquin
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- Born in Canada but moved to her mother's native New Zealand when she was 4; has dual citizenship.
- Has no formal training in acting.
- Won an Oscar for her work in The Piano when she was 11, the second youngest person to have done so (Tatum O'Neal was the youngest, at 10, for Paper Moon).
- Keeps her Oscar statuette in the closet so visitors don't feel that they have to make conversation about it.
- Made her professional stage debut in 2001 in Rebecca Gilman's The Glory of Living (directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman), which earned her a Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Actress in a Play.
- Other stage work includes Neil LaBute's The Distance From Here (2004) and Gina Gionfriddo's After Ashley (2005) in New York, and Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth (2002).
- Formed production company with her filmmaker brother, Andrew, called Paquin Films; their first film was Blue State (2007).
- Appeared on the silver screen with husband and True Blood costar Stephen Moyer in Open House (2010), a thriller her brother Andrew wrote and directed.