Two-Time Academy Award Nominee Scarlett Johansson Is Also a Two-Time Broadway Actress

Scarlett Johansson may have just been nominated for her first Academy Award (actually two), but did you know the Marriage Story star is also a Tony winner? To celebrate their Oscar nominations, this week, Broadway.com is looking at the stage careers of some of this year’s nominees, including Cynthia Erivo, Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce, Al Pacino, and Antonio Banderas. Some of them started off in theater, some of them were film stars who were then attracted to the bright lights of Broadway, and some regularly travel back and forth. For more on Oscar nominees who straddle stage and screen, look here.

Below, learn more about the joyful stage career of Johansson, who is nominated this year for Best Actress (Marriage Story) and Best Supporting Actress (Jojo Rabbit).

Stepping Onto A View From the Bridge (2010)
As a kid growing up in New York City, it was theater that made Johansson want to be an actor. As she told Broadway.com's Paul Wontorek in 2010, “I actually started acting because I wanted to be in a musical," adding, "I must have seen Les Miz a zillion times!” She appeared in her first play when she was nine: off-Broadway's Sophistry at Playwrights Horizons, starring Ethan Hawke and Calista Flockhart (Johansson had one line). 

Fast forward to 2010, when Johansson made her Broadway debut in Arthur Miller's classic drama A View From the Bridge. The play takes place in an Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, where the middle-aged Eddie is obsessed with his wife’s teenaged niece Catherine. Johansson played Catherine opposite Liev Schreiber’s Eddie.

For her tender yet forceful portrayal of the young woman, Johansson won the 2010 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. In a tearful acceptance speech, she said, "Being welcomed into this community has been an absolutely dream come true for me. Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be on Broadway and here I am.” 

From Catherine to Maggie the Cat (2013)
It was only three years later that Johansson returned to Broadway, this time in a more mature role as Maggie the Cat in Tennessee William’s Pulitzer-winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The drama is about a Southern family in strife when the patriarch, Big Daddy, finds out he's dying. Meanwhile, golden son Brick and his wife Maggie are in rocky marital waters. In the 2013 production, Johansson played Maggie in a turn that was both calculating and sensual.

She also had the unenviable task of doing most of the talking in act one. As Johansson told Broadway.com at the time, she’s much less verbose in real life. “I don’t have the stamina of Maggie in my actual life," she said with a laugh. 

Johansson hasn’t been to Broadway since (no doubt because Marvel has been keeping her busy), but considering how much she loves live audiences, we have no doubt we’ll see Johansson back on stage soon. As she told Broadway.com in 2013: “I’ve come to realize, even more so this time around, that the fourth wall is not actually between you and the audience. They’re the barometer of truth and of timing and of nuance. It’s very touching to know that the audience is with you and they feel you, as you feel them. It’s a real gift. I think that’s the best part of the whole gig, really.”