A young New York dancer bounces between flats and sublets in black and white; she starred in it and co-wrote it (2012)
Frances Ha — directed by Noah Baumbach, and the film that made her name.
Film · Hollywood
Greta Gerwig
born 1983 · American
Mumblecore to the studio blockbuster
Greta Gerwig emerged as the face of American mumblecore, acting in and improvising tiny independent films, then moved behind the camera and became the first woman to direct a film that took more than a billion dollars. Her films are warm, verbally quick coming-of-age stories about women arguing with their mothers, their sisters and their own ambitions. She is now making a fantasy series for Netflix.
How to spot them
- ▸Fast, overlapping dialogue and a heroine who is embarrassing, ambitious and forgiven
- ▸Mothers and daughters, sisters, and the question of whether wanting to be great is allowed
- ▸Warm, grainy photography and needle-drops of 1990s and 2000s pop
- ▸Collaboration with Noah Baumbach as co-writer and partner, and with Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet as leads
- ▸Literary sources reworked so that the adaptation argues with the book
Key films
A Sacramento teenager renames herself, fights with her mother and applies in secret to east-coast colleges (2017)
Lady Bird — her solo directing debut, with Saoirse Ronan; five Oscar nominations.
Four Massachusetts sisters in the Civil War years, told in two interleaved timelines with a rewritten ending (2019)
Little Women — from Louisa May Alcott; it won the Oscar for costume design.
A plastic doll walks out of a pink dreamhouse into Los Angeles and has an existential crisis (2023)
Barbie — over $1.4 billion, the highest-grossing film of 2023.
A graduate student is taken up by her chaotic future stepsister, who wants to open a restaurant (2015)
Mistress America — she starred and co-wrote with Baumbach.
A boy, a girl, rings that carry them between worlds, and a lion singing a new world into being (2027)
Narnia: The Magician's Nephew — her Netflix adaptation of C. S. Lewis, due in cinemas in February 2027.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Sacramento on 4 August 1983; she studied English and philosophy at Barnard College after being turned down for playwriting programmes
- •She appeared in mumblecore films including Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and co-directed Nights and Weekends (2008) with Joe Swanberg
- •Lady Bird made her only the fifth woman nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director, after Lina Wertmüller, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow
- •Barbie was the first film directed solely by a woman to take more than a billion dollars; her omission from the Best Director nominations became a public controversy
- •She has four Oscar nominations and has not yet won; she is nominated as writer or director, never as an actor
- •Noah Baumbach is her partner and co-writer; they wrote Barbie and White Noise together, and she acted in several of his films
- •She has acted in Greenberg (2010), Jackie (2016), 20th Century Women (2016) and White Noise (2022)
- •She presided over the jury of the Cannes Film Festival in 2024
- •Netflix moved her Narnia film to a full global theatrical release on 12 February 2027, with streaming from 2 April — a first for the company
Drill it — 10 cards
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