Hannah Dakota Fanning (born February 23, 1994 in Conyers, Georgia) is an American actor.
She has been nominated for many awards, and whenever a female child actor starts gaining attention, she is referred to as "the next Dakota Fanning." She attended New York University, and continues to work on film projects in her adulthood.
Her sister Elle Fanning is also an actor.
Roles
- ER (2000) as Delia Chadsey
- Ally McBeal (2000) as 5-year-old Ally McBeal
- Strong Medicine (2000) as Edie's Girl
- CSI (2000) as Brenda Collins
- Private Practice (2000) as Alessa Engel
- Spin City (2000) as Cindy
- Malcolm in the Middle (2001) as Emily
- Tomcats (2001) as Little Girl in Park
- Family Guy (2001) as Little Girl (voice)
- i am sam (2001) as Lucy Diamond Dawson
- Sweet Home Alabama (2002) as Young Melanie Carmichael
- Taken (2002) as Allison "Allie" Keys
- Uptown Girls (2003) as Laraine "Ray" Schleine
- The Cat in the Hat (2003) as Sally Walden
- Kim Possible A Sitch in Time(2003) as Pre-K Kim.
- Friends (2004) as Mackenzie
- Man on Fire (2004) as Lupita Ramos
- Justice League Unlimited (2004) as Young Wonder Woman (voice)
- Hide and Seek (2005) as Emily Callaway
- War of the Worlds (2005) as Rachel Ferrier
- Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch (2005) as Lilo Pelekai (voice)
- My Neighbor Totoro (2005) as Satsuki Kusakabe (voice; Disney's English dub)
- Charlotte's Web (2006) as Fern Arable
- The Secret Life of Bees (2008) as Lily Owens
- Push (2009) as Cassie Holmes
- Coraline (2009) as Coraline Jones (voice)
- The Twilight series (2009-10, 2012) as Jane
- The Runaways (2010) as Cherie Currie
- Night Moves (2013) as Dena
- Yellowbird (2014) as Delf (voice)
- Brimstone (2016) as Liz
- American Pastoral (2016) as Meredith "Merry" Levov
- Zygote (2017) as Barklay
- Please Stand By (2017) as Wendy
- The Alienist (2018, 2020) as Sara Howard
- Ocean's 8 (2018) as Penelope Stern
- gen:LOCK (2019, 2021) as Miranda Worth (voice)
- Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) as Lynette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme
- The First Lady (2022) as Susan Ford
- The Equalizer 3 (2023) as Emma Collins
- Ripley (2024) as Marge Sherwood
Tropes about her:
- Actor-Shared Background: She had ballet training, like her character Ray in Uptown Girls.
- Billing Displacement: In The Runaways she is billed second - despite Cherie being the protagonist - because Kristen Stewart was at the height of her popularity from The Twilight Saga.
- Chronically Killed Actor: She has a reasonably high death count for her age. She dies of cancer in Now Is Good, strangled to death in Night Moves and drowns herself in Brimstone. In Twilight, her character is already an undead, yet gets a gory death scene nevertheless (although it ends up being a vision).
- Contractual Purity: She ought to shake off her wholesome child star image in Hounddog - where her character gets raped. And in The Runaways, where she plays a teenage girl who gets made into a sex symbol and turns to drugs and alcohol.
- Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Most of her characters, particularly from when she was a kid.
- Method Acting: For Man on Fire she learned to swim, play piano and speak Spanish.
- Money, Dear Boy: Inverted. She apparently took a pay cut to get equal billing alongside Robert De Niro on Hide & Seek.
- Playing Against Type:
- A Creepy Child (complete with brown hair!) in Hide & Seek.
- A sadistic vampire in Twilight.
- And Manson family member Lynette Fromme in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
- Real-Life Relative: Ellen Fanning plays her younger self in i am sam and Taken - as well as voicing sisters together in the 2005 English dub of My Neighbor Totoro.
- Reality Subtext: For the argument in the studio during The Runaways, the actors were all exhausted from how long the scene took to film. The natural exhaustion led to them just shouting at each other during the takes.
- Star-Making Role: i am sam, making her the youngest person to be nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award.
- Those Two Actors: She and Kristen Stewart star in the Twilight movies (though Dakota doesn't appear in the first one) and The Runaways. In fact, she took the role of Jane because she already knew they would be starring in The Runaways together - and wanted to establish the relationship between Cherie Curie and Joan Jett.
- Throw It In!:
- She lost her front teeth right before filming Man on Fire. Although filmmakers made fake teeth for her, they decided not to use them.
- Cherie Curie lent her a belt to wear while filming The Runaways. Joan Jett recognized it and on the DVD commentary states that Cherie wore it many times while touring with the band.
- What Could Have Been:
- She and her sister Elle were going to play the sisters in My Sister's Keeper. She backed out because she didn't want to shave her head for the part, and this led to Sofia Vassilieva and Abigail Breslin playing the roles.
- Offered the role of Leslie Burke in Bridge to Terabithia but had to turn it down due to scheduling conflicts.
- Coraline was originally planned as a live action film. Dakota still would have played the lead. It was changed to animation, with Dakota providing the voice of the titular girl.
