Jennifer Lawrence

by Nadia Cohen

  And she went on to tell W magazine that as a child she took some crazy risks on horseback, without realising the dangers involved: ‘You do become more aware of your mortality as you get older. When you’re little, you jump on any wild horse. Then you get a little bit older and realise how fragile life is, and you’re more careful.’

  As well as spending countless hours on horseback, as a child growing up in America’s Deep South, Jennifer also loved listening to stories, whether being read for hours from her favourite books, on TV or in the movies. Whenever she travelled with her parents or grandparents, they recalled, she would plead with them to tell her story after story, after story.

  ‘My parents always had to tell me stories, or I was telling stories, reading stories,’ she said. Usually she would become completely absorbed in the tales she was told, and it was often the only time hyperactive young Jennifer would be known to go completely silent. She would remember every detail; her family all remember one particular Christmas Day when her grandfather was re-telling a story she already knew well and she suddenly interrupted him to point out that he had forgotten to mention a few specific details she had remembered hearing before when she was very young.

  Her memory was as vivid as her imagination. Friends recall a time when travelling on the school bus, Jennifer noticed that the driver didn’t stop at the usual drop-off point for some reason. At the time she was deeply engrossed in the novel Ransom, and had become so absorbed in the elaborate storyline that she was immediately convinced she too was being kidnapped!

  Jennifer was quite the daredevil, and with her imagination going into overdrive, she panicked and immediately started to plan her escape. Without a thought for the consequences she decided to jump out of the back of the fast-moving bus and asked her friends to follow her lead. They agreed, naturally thinking she was joking. But Jennifer lifted the emergency exit handle and risked her life by actually leaping out of the vehicle. No one followed her; they were all too shocked and scared.

  Some years later a friend told MailOnline: ‘The driver wouldn’t let us get off at our stop, so Jen said, “Right, if I jump out of the back of the bus will you all follow?”

  ‘Out of nowhere she just lifts up the emergency exit and leaps out. I’ve never seen anyone run so fast, it was like she took five steps in the air. No one followed her, not one person. It’s illegal to do that, as well.’

  Miraculously, Jennifer was not hurt but instead of being punished for her daredevil antics, she managed to wriggle her way out of trouble by calling on her acting skills. ‘The next day she was supposed to get suspended but instead she told them she had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder over the incident after reading the book, and they ended up giving her a week off homework,’ her friend added.

  Jennifer said later: ‘I have an overactive imagination. I still have the mind of an eleven-year-old.’

  The anecdote has gone down in her personal history as one which sums up her particularly zany behaviour. That incident was just one of many examples of Jennifer’s hyperactiveness as a child. Her friends also recalled the time she nearly burnt down the family home while messing around with flammable cigarette lighter fluid, which she decided to spray all over a hot barbecue. ‘We got in trouble with lighter fluid once,’ one of the pals explained. ‘We found some by the outdoor grill and we were spraying the lighter fluid and her parents went mad because we almost set the house on fire.’

  Since finding fame, her childhood friends have divulged all kinds of information about Jennifer – and even claimed that her boisterous nature meant their local church had to replace the Sunday-school teacher four times because they were unable to control her behaviour!

  Friends also revealed how Jennifer decided to open a lemonade stand during one long hot summer holiday, but this was no conventional refreshment stall. She pulled an elaborate prank on the entire neighbourhood: instead of adding sugar to the mix, Jennifer sprinkled the lemonade with salt and pepper and sold it to unsuspecting passers-by. By all accounts she made quite a bit of money and even videotaped the prank.

  Looking back now, it seems hardly surprising that she would eventually upgrade her pranks to photobombing Taylor Swift and Sarah Jessica Parker on the red carpet at the Met Ball and the Golden Globes.

  As a child Jennifer was always bursting with so much energy that her brothers changed her nickname from Jenny-Lou to Nitro (short for nitroglycerin) because she was incredibly curious about everything around her and never stayed still – as a toddler, she ran instead of walking. She publicly revealed her childhood nickname in an interview with The Tonight Show’s Conan O’Brien in November 2013, explaining that it was because she was ‘unstoppable and hyper’. It was the first of many nicknames: later she became known as J-Law, J-Lo and Jenny from the Block.

  In the same revealing interview, Jennifer added that no calming medication would work on her, and she was still wetting the bed at the age of thirteen, but would go to school the next day and tell everyone about it, convinced it was ‘funny and cool’.

  She later recalled telling her mother: ‘I’d come home and be like, “Everyone is calling me weird,” and she’s like, “Well, you are weird, but be yourself.’”

  And in an appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman she revealed even more details about her childhood, explaining: ‘I was just like a pathological liar when I was a kid. I think I just wanted to one-up somebody. Somebody would be like, “Oh, God, my legs hurt!” I’d be like, “Your legs hurt? I’m getting mine amputated next week!”

  ‘And that’s actually how my mother found out. She came to school and somebody was like, “God, that’s such a shame about Jennifer’s legs!” She had me purge. I had to spill out all of my lies.

  ‘I was like, “I said that Dad drove a barge, and we were millionaires, and you were pregnant, I had to get my legs amputated, and I spayed cats and dogs on the weekends.” Now, I can’t lie.’

  Being the youngest female in the family never prevented her from throwing herself into boisterous games, which usually involved various types of fighting, wrestling and catapult wars in the back garden. She would demand to play outside with a ball while the other girls preferred to bake cookies at pre-school; after a while Jennifer was not allowed to play with some of the girls at all because she was simply too rough.

  ‘I didn’t want her to be a diva,’ her mother Karen later told Rolling Stone. ‘I didn’t mind if she was girlie as long as she was tough. She didn’t mean to hurt them, they were just making cookies and she wanted to play ball.’

  When she moved on to Kemmerer Middle School at the age of eleven, Jennifer proved to be naturally very sporty, and preferred being out on the sports fields to being stuck in classrooms, so made sure she joined the school teams for cheerleading, field hockey and softball. With her blonde hair, blue eyes and naturally athletic figure, she appeared from the outside to be the average all-American teenager, but appearances can be deceptive and it later emerged that her experience of formal education had not been a good one. Beneath the surface she was actually deeply troubled and her bright smile hid a dark sadness that worried her parents.

  Karen has told how her daughter started out as a curious girl who had a ‘bright light’ in her, but she seemed to lose that light when she went to school.

  Jennifer herself told The Sun: ‘I changed schools a lot when I was in elementary school because some girls were mean. They were less mean in middle school, because I was doing all right, although this one girl gave me invitations to hand out to her birthday party that I wasn’t invited to. But that was fine. I just hocked a loogie [phlegm] on them and threw them in the trash.’

  School photos, though, show her looking happy and enjoying life – and she was once dubbed ‘most talkative’. She did her best to fit in with the other girls, and just like the others, she was besotted with pop stars, but it was all an act.

  She later revealed in a Q&A with Yahoo: ‘My teen crush – Justin Timberlake. ’90s Justin Timberlake, tho
ugh, like *NSYNC Justin Timberlake. I remember when I bought the *NSYNC CD, and I was listening to it, and I was flipping through. Remember how CDs had the pullout picture things? And I was getting so overwhelmed with hormones that I almost threw up.’

  Despite appearing quite normal on the outside, Jennifer has since admitted that she suffered from anxiety during those awkward teenage years, and never really felt comfortable in her own skin until she discovered acting. Although she has many happy memories of childhood holidays and outings with her family, Jennifer has confessed that she was always very comfortable at home, but for several years she found it difficult to fit in at school.

  She found social events particularly hard to handle. In a deeply personal interview with The Huffington Post, she later explained how she hated break times and school trips, and would easily become anxious about attending birthday parties and large gatherings. ‘I was a weirdo,’ she said, candidly. ‘I wasn’t smarter than the other kids, that’s not why I didn’t fit in. I’ve always just had this weird anxiety. I hated recess. I didn’t like field trips. Parties really stressed me out. And I had a very different sense of humour.

  ‘My family went on a cruise and I got a terrible haircut. FYI: never get your hair cut on a cruise. I had, like, this blonde curly ’fro and I walked into the gym the first day back in seventh grade and everyone was staring at me, and for some reason I thought, “I know what I need to do!” And I just started sprinting from one end of the gym to the other, and I thought it was hilarious. But nobody else at that age really did. It was genuinely weird.’

  Jennifer felt like an outsider, as if she was somehow different to the other kids, and as a result was sent for therapy in a bid to get to the bottom of her emotional distress. She told Vogue magazine, ‘I saw a shrink,’ adding that she ended up on medication for several years.

  Despite getting excellent grades, and being a popular member of various sports teams, Jennifer was miserable and her emotional issues didn’t really clear up until she graduated from high school two years early at the age of fifteen – as part of a bargain agreed with her parents to pursue her dream of becoming an actress.

  But she remained close to her childhood friends, rather than adopting a newfound showbiz entourage, and never forgot them. As a teenager she struck up a close bond with a local boy called Andy Strunk, who suffered from Down’s syndrome, and continued to send him photos and posters long after she left home.

  But far from having her sights set on the glitz and glamour of Hollywood at that stage, a younger Jennifer had always insisted that her dream was to become a doctor – even though she had discovered her talent for acting at the age of five when she started reciting lines from Adam Sandler’s 1995 movie Billy Madison, and began acting out cheerleading sketches from the TV comedy show, Saturday Night Live.

  Whether she planned it or not, her talent could not be hidden and she officially started acting when she was just nine years old and was cast as a prostitute from the city of Nineveh in a play about Jonah and the whale at her family’s local church. Her mother later told Rolling Stone magazine: ‘The other girls just stood there with lipstick on, but she came in swinging her booty and strutting her stuff. Our friends said, “We don’t know if we should congratulate you or not, because your kid’s a great prostitute.’”

  Jennifer clearly recalls seeing the script for the play, and realising that was the moment she wanted to act. ‘I read a script,’ she told Glamour magazine. ‘I wasn’t the best student. I got As and Bs, but I remember being in the classroom and looking around and being like, “Oh, all of you get this”, and just feeling stupid. And then I read a script, and I just fell in love. I didn’t feel stupid anymore. I just found something I was good at.’

  She also played Desdemona, the female lead in Shakespeare’s play Othello, during a semester at the Walden Theatre in Louisville when she was fourteen. Her acting coach, Charlie Sexton, immediately spotted great potential in Jennifer, and described her as ‘inquisitive, eager and attentive’ in class.

  She was also happy to sing in front of audiences back then, although later when she had to sing on the set of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, she was so terrified that she broke down and cried. It seemed hard to imagine her fear when it emerged that she actually had a great voice. When she became famous, CNN dug up some vintage footage of Jennifer performing in Othello, where she sung live on stage and sounded great.

  Charlie Sexton described Jennifer as ‘precocious and energetic’ in those days, adding: ‘She had to sing a cappella and that’s not easy to do and a lot of kids will shy away from that. It doesn’t surprise me that she had the courage to do that because she was determined and unflappable.’

  Following her short stint at theatre school, Jennifer’s life suddenly took an unexpected turn that would change the course of it for ever. In 2005, fourteen-year-old Jennifer was on a spring break with her mother in New York. They stopped to watch a troupe of breakdancers performing in Union Square.

  As she enjoyed the high-energy show, little did Jennifer realise that she herself was also being watched: a talent scout had spotted her in the crowd. By sheer coincidence he happened to be shooting an advertisement for the fashion chain H&M in the same park. He approached Jennifer and Karen holding a Polaroid camera, introduced himself and explained that in his opinion she would make a great model.

  When he asked their permission to take a photo of Jennifer, Karen and her daughter were understandably surprised by the out-of-the-blue proposal, but Jennifer was flattered and excited about the opportunity, so they agreed and Karen gave him her phone number.

  Jennifer said later that her mother did not find the situation creepy at the time, although afterwards they both realised just how strange such an unexpected incident could have been. It could easily have been a scam or a trap, but fortunately the photographer turned out to be a legitimate scout, and it was not long before modelling agencies were on the phone asking to meet the newcomer. Within days they were bombarding Karen with exciting-sounding requests, inviting Jennifer for interviews, casting calls and auditions.

  Several talent agents were so thrilled at meeting Jennifer that they tried to persuade Karen to spend the rest of the summer in Manhattan with her teenage daughter, and although at first she just thought they were being polite, within days Jennifer was completely convinced that it was exactly where she needed to be in order to launch the career she longed for.

  Her parents knew nothing of the world of television, films or fashion and so they took a bit of persuading to let Jennifer try her luck in New York. But their headstrong daughter was so sure that she wanted her life to take a different path away from her rural home that she managed to convince them to let her stay on in the city by showing them a local newspaper article about a boy from Kentucky who had made the move and was already starring in a movie called Little Manhattan. Ironically, that young boy was Josh Hutcherson who would later become Jennifer’s Hunger Games co-star and close friend.

  Jennifer was determined to get her way, and so she called her brothers, who she knew would find it much easier to see the potential opportunities that lay ahead for her. They agreed to help convince Gary and Karen to let her stay in New York for two months, even though they too had initially been a little sceptical about where it might lead.

  ‘My brothers called my parents and said, “She’s been to every football game. She’s been to every baseball game. This is her baseball diamond – you guys would do it if it were the World Series. You guys have to do it for her.”’

  The Lawrence family was all about sports, not about performing, fashion or modelling – Karen even said that Jennifer would have made a great baseball player – but eventually they agreed to a trial period in the Big Apple. They knew it was a risk, but Jennifer was determined to make it pay off.

  Money was tight, and flights between Kentucky and New York did not come cheap, so the family had to take out two mortgages on their home in order to afford for Jennifer to m
ake the move. It was a massive gamble, but Karen later admitted that the light she had seen in her little girl before she started school had returned in full force once she found something that really excited her.

  Jennifer was well aware that her parents were making a huge sacrifice in order to allow their only daughter to live her dream, and she was also aware that they had envisioned a far more ordinary life for their little girl – to grow up in their hometown and raise a family. Now she was leaving home much earlier than they had imagined, and Karen was concerned about unscrupulous people taking advantage of her. As a mother, she wanted to be by Jennifer’s side as she made her way between auditions and castings, but she was needed back at Camp Hi-Ho since it was the middle of their busy summer period, and it was too expensive and time-consuming for her to keep flying back and forth to Kentucky. But Jennifer would not take no for an answer, and eventually it was agreed that her elder brother Blaine would stay with her in an apartment in Manhattan. (The two siblings are very close and Jennifer stole the show as a stunning bridesmaid at Blaine’s wedding in October 2013.) Together they met with an acting coach called Flo Greenberg, and during the initial consultation, Flo was brimming with praise for this new discovery. She later described Jennifer as: ‘Brilliantly talented, lovely, versatile and sensitive,’ adding, ‘She was loaded with genuine talent and her own instincts shone through beautifully.’

  And Flo clearly knew a good thing when she saw it for within weeks Jennifer had landed a string of TV commercials and photo shoots, including an advert for MTV’s My Super Sweet 16, a TV commercial for Burger King and a modelling job for the upmarket American fashion chain Abercrombie & Fitch. For the Abercrombie & Fitch campaign she joined a group of other honed and toned young models throwing a football on a beach. But none of the stylish photos of Jennifer were used in the end. She explained later: ‘All the other girls are looking cute, modelling while playing football. And my face is bright red, my nostrils are flared and I’m mid-leap about to take this tackle like, “Rahhrrr!” I’m not even looking at the camera. The other girls were like, “Get her away from me!’”