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She is the granddaughter of Tippi Hedren to boot, Dakota Johnson seemed to be born to shine. From her debut at the age of 10 to her breakthrough with “Fifty Shades of Grey,” we take a look back at the career of a leading Hollywood actress.
Needless to say, the road to the seventh art seemed all mapped out for Dakota Johnson. Especially since her maternal grandmother is none other than the famous Hitchcockian muse Tippi Hedren. However, if the young woman knew from a very young age that she wanted to become an actress, her parents initially tried to dissuade her. “They wanted me to have as fulfilling a childhood as possible”, Dakota Johnson explained in 2022, in an interview. A fulfilling childhood, which the actress from Texas will know only too well.
Born on October 4, 1989, Dakota Johnson grew up between Colorado and California, surrounded by her parents’ respective filming. Both being actors, the young woman spent several years moving from one place to another. “I had an incredibly lucky and privileged life, and the life I led growing up was remarkable: the places I went, the way we lived and what we were able to experience,” she recalled in “Vanity Fair” in 2022. A scattered childhood that intensified even more in 1994, when Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson decided to divorce, then in 1996, when the actress remarried a certain Antonio Banderas. It was also with her famous stepfather that Dakota Johnson discovered acting for the first time in 1999. At the age of ten at the time, she got her first role in the film “Crazy in Alabama”, directed by the Spaniard and in which my mother also played. A youth in no way ordinary, which nevertheless did not happen without a few disappointments.
Celebrity and disappointments
Faced with her parents’ fame and media coverage, Dakota Johnson admits that she became a rebellious young girl as a teenager. “I didn’t really follow the rules. I was like a wild, fierce little kid. […] I got into all sorts of trouble,” she explains, as reported by “The Sun.” Some rumors even go so far as to say that she spent time in rehab at the age of 17, to deal with alcohol and drug addictions. But in reality, this is not the case. The actress claims to have instead undergone therapy. “My parents also had issues that forced me to deal with adult issues at a very young age. I needed help with that, in terms of therapy.”
If Dakota Johnson turned to modeling in the years following her on-screen foray in “Crazy in Alabama”, she would soon return to her first love. In 2010, the actress returned to the cinema with a role in David Fincher’s “The Social Network”. Then the public found her on the bill for comedies such as “21 Jump Street” and “The Five Year Itch” in 2012. But it was really the year 2015 that would propel her to the forefront of the stage, where her parents were before her. That year, she was chosen to play the highly coveted role of Anastasia Steele in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” saga, alongside Jamie Dornan. A resounding success at the box office and above all, the beginning of a new chapter for Dakota Johnson. From now on, she is forging her own path and her parents will also claim to have never watched the saga. “As a father, there are certain images that you don’t need to have in your head,” Don Johnson joked in 2018, in the columns of “People”.
Close to her parents, Dakota Johnson is just as close to the man who would be her stepfather for more than fifteen years . Better still, to the man who would reveal her for the first time in the cinema: Antonio Banderas. When presenting him with an award on the stage of the Hollywood Film Awards in 2019, she said: “My stepfather Antonio Banderas burst into our lives. He was so dynamic, so fun and so funny, and his English was abstract. […] He loved my mother, my brothers and sisters and me so intensely, so hard and so loud, that it would change our lives forever. Antonio taught me true passion and discipline.” Today endowed with the status of a leading actress of her generation, she who has also shared her life with Chris Martin since 2017, Dakota Johnson has undoubtedly been able to chart her own destiny, without ever forgetting the legacy of her elders.
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