Amy Lou Adams (born August 20, 1974) is an American actress. Known for both her comedic and dramatic roles, she has been featured three times in annual rankings of the world's highest-paid actresses. She has received various accolades including two Golden Globes, and has been nominated for six Academy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards.
Adams began her career as a dancer in a dinner theater, which she pursued from 1994 to 1998, and made her film debut with a supporting part in the dark comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999). She made guest appearances on television and took "mean girl" parts in low-budget feature films. Her first major role was in Steven Spielberg's biopic Catch Me If You Can (2002), but she was unemployed for a year afterward. Her breakthrough came when she played a loquacious pregnant woman in the independent comedy-drama Junebug (2005), for which she received her first Academy Award nomination.
The musical fantasy film Enchanted (2007), in which Adams played cheerful princess-to-be Giselle, was her first success in a leading role. She followed it by playing other naïve, optimistic women in films like the drama Doubt (2008) and Sunshine Cleaning (2008) and subsequently played more assertive parts to positive reviews in the sports film The Fighter (2010) and the psychological drama The Master (2012). From 2013 to 2017, she portrayed Lois Lane in superhero films set in the DC Extended Universe. She won two consecutive Golden Globes for Best Actress for playing a seductive con artist in the crime film American Hustle (2013) and painter Margaret Keane in the biopic Big Eyes (2014). Further acclaim came for playing a linguist in the science fiction film Arrival (2016), a self-harming reporter in the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects (2018), and Lynne Cheney in the satire Vice (2018).
On stage, Adams starred in a Public Theater revival of Into the Woods in 2012 and a West End revival of The Glass Menagerie in 2022. In 2014, she was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time, and featured in the Forbes Celebrity 100 list.
Amy Lou Adams was born on August 20, 1974, in Aviano, Friuli, Italy, to American parents Kathryn and Richard Adams, while her father served in the United States Army at the local air base. She is the middle child of seven, with four brothers and two sisters. After moving from one army base to another, the family settled in Castle Rock, Colorado when she was eight. After leaving the Army, her father sang professionally in nightclubs and restaurants.
Adams says that going to her father's shows and drinking Shirley Temples at a bar are among her fondest childhood memories. The family was poor; they camped, hiked together, and performed amateur skits written by her father or sometimes by her mother. She was enthusiastic about being in the plays and always played the lead.
Adams grew up Mormon until her parents divorced in 1985 and left the church. She did not have strong religious beliefs, but said that she values her upbringing for teaching her love and compassion. After the breakup, her father moved to Arizona and remarried, while the children remained with their mother. Her mother became a semi-professional bodybuilder who took the children with her to the gym when she trained. Adams has compared her uninhibited early years with her siblings to Lord of the Flies. She said that she was a "scrappy, tough kid" and fought frequently with other children.
Adams attended Douglas County High School in Castle Rock. She was not academically inclined, but was interested in the creative arts and sang in the school choir. She competed in track and gymnastics, harbored ambitions of becoming a ballerina, and trained as an apprentice at the local David Taylor Dance Company. She disliked high school keeping mostly to herself. After graduation she and her mother moved to Atlanta. She did not go to college, to her parents' disappointment and she later regretted not pursuing higher education. At 18, she realized she was not gifted enough to be a professional ballerina, and found musical theater to be more to her taste. One of her first stage roles was in a community theater production of Annie, which she did as a volunteer. Supporting herself, she worked as a greeter at a GAP store and as a waitress at Hooters, but left the job when she saved enough money to buy a used car.
1994–2004: Dinner theater and early screen appearances
Adams began her professional career as a dancer in a 1994 dinner theater production of A Chorus Line in Boulder, Colorado. The job required her to wait on tables before getting up on stage to perform. She enjoyed singing and dancing, but disliked waitressing and ran into trouble when a fellow dancer, whom she considered a friend, made false accusations about her to the director. Adams said, "I never really knew what the lies were. I only knew I kept getting called in and lectured about my lack of professionalism." She lost the job but went on to perform in dinner theater at Denver's Heritage Square Music Hall and Country Dinner Playhouse. During a performance of Anything Goes at the Country Dinner Playhouse in 1995, she was spotted by Michael Brindisi, the president and artistic director of the Chanhassen, Minnesota-based Chanhassen Dinner Theatres, who offered her a job there. Adams moved to Chanhassen, where she performed in the theater for the next three years. She loved the "security and schedule" of the job, and has said that she learned tremendously from it. Nonetheless, the grueling work took its toll on her: "I had a lot of recurring injuries—bursitis in my knees, pulled muscles in my groin, my adductor and abductor. My body was wearing out."
During her time at Chanhassen, Adams acted in her first film—a black-and-white short satire named The Chromium Hook. Soon after, while she was off work nursing a pulled muscle, she attended the locally held auditions for the Hollywood film Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), a satire on beauty pageants starring Kirsten Dunst, Ellen Barkin, and Kirstie Alley. Adams was cast in the supporting part of a promiscuous cheerleader. She felt that her character's personality was far removed from her own and worried about how people would perceive her. The production was filmed locally, which enabled Adams to shoot for her role while also performing Brigadoon on stage. Encouragement from Alley prompted Adams to actively pursue a film career, and she moved to Los Angeles in January 1999. She described her initial experience in the city as "dark" and "bleak", and she pined for her life back in Chanhassen.
In Los Angeles, Adams auditioned for whatever parts came her way, but she was mostly given roles of "the bitchy girl". Her first assignment came within a week of her relocation in the Fox television series Manchester Prep, a spin-off of the film Cruel Intentions, in the lead role of Kathryn Merteuil (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar in the film). After numerous script revisions and two production shutdowns, the series was canceled. Adams later said a controversial scene in which her character encourages a girl to masturbate on a horse was the primary reason for its cancellation. The three filmed episodes were re-edited and released later in 2000 as the direct-to-video film Cruel Intentions 2. Despite a negative critical reception, Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club wrote that Adams played her "alpha-bitch role with vicious glee largely missing from Sarah Michelle Gellar's sterile take on the character".
Adams next had a supporting role as the teenage nemesis of a movie star (played by Kimberly Davies) in Psycho Beach Party (2000), a horror parody of beach party and slasher films. She played the part as a homage to actress Ann-Margret. From 2000 to 2002, Adams appeared in guest roles in several television series, including That '70s Show, Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville, and The West Wing.
After brief roles in three small-scale features of 2002—The Slaughter Rule, Pumpkin, and Serving Sara—Adams got her first major role in Steven Spielberg's comedy-drama Catch Me If You Can. She played Brenda Strong, a nurse with whom Frank Abagnale Jr. (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) falls in love. Despite the film's success and praise for her "warm presence" from Variety critic Todd McCarthy, it failed to boost her career. She was unemployed for a year after its release, leading her to almost quit film acting. Spielberg was surprised that she did not break through soon after the film's release. Adams instead enrolled in acting classes, realizing that she had "a lot to learn and a lot of self-growth to work through". Her career prospects seemingly improved a year later when she received a lucrative offer to star as a regular in the CBS television drama Dr. Vegas, but she was dropped after a few episodes. In film, she only had a minor role in the Fred Savage-starring The Last Run (2004).