An American actress with a German father and a Swedish mother
 

Kirsten Dunst holds on tight in SPIDER-MAN 2. POSTERS > Kirsten Dunst

For a girl who only graduated from high school in 2000, Kirsten Dunst already has a rather extensive list of credits to her name. She has appeared in more than 40 feature films and TV movies, not even counting her television series and over 70 commercials.

Most moviegoers first became aware of Dunst in her role as Mary Jane Watson in the first Spider-Man movie (2002), but her first credited screen role goes back to 1990, when at the age of seven she played Campbell McCoy in The Bonfires of the Vanities. Four years later, an eleven-year-old Kirsten Dunst gave an amazing performance as the vampire Claudia in Interview With the Vampire. For that role she had to pretend she was a 35-year-old woman in the body of a young girl. Her performance with actors Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt earned her the Chicago Film Critics Award for most promising actress, a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actress, and the sci-fi Saturn Award for the best performance by a younger actor.

Kirsten (pron. KEER-sten) Caroline Dunst was born in Point Pleasant, New Jersey on April 30, 1982. Her German father, Klaus Hermann Dunst, is originally from Hamburg. (German Dunst means “haze” or “mist” in English.) As a child she would go to Hamburg and Düsseldorf to visit her German grandparents. Although her father spoke German to her when she was young, Kiki (her nickname) knows very little German today. But her family did observe some German traditions in the U.S., such as opening presents on Christmas Eve rather than on the 25th. Kirsten also knows some German Christmas carols and children's songs.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (1994)
Kirsten Dunst was only 11 when she
played a young vampire in this film.
> BUY THE DVD
 

Her Swedish-born mother, Inez, was a Lufthansa stewardess before she went to America with her husband. It was Inez who took her attractive three-year-old daughter to New York to make her first commercials. By seven, Kirsten had her first movie role, an uncredited appearance in a segment of Woody Allen's New York Stories (1989). After that, mother, daughter, and Kirsten's brother Christian (b. 1987) moved to Los Angeles. Kirsten was nine. After four years of living on opposite coasts, Kirsten's parents divorced. Growing up as an actress, Kirsten had managers, PR people, stylists, and other things that most children are not familiar with. Soon she had earned enough money in Hollywood to buy her family a 14-room villa in Toluca Lake. But despite a busy film schedule, Kirsten's parents made sure she finished her education. She graduated from the private Catholic Notre Dame High School in 2000. She also has plans to go to college, but her frequent cinematic work could interfere with that.

POSTERS > Kirsten Dunst Posters

Somehow Dunst has managed to avoid some of the serious problems that have plagued many child stars before her. Now as a woman, she has a very active film career that includes more work with director Sofia Coppola as Marie-Antoinette in the film of the same name, a third installment of the Spider-Man series, and the recently completed film Elizabethtown.

NEXT > See the Kirsten Dunst filmography and links on the next page...

N E X T > Kirsten Dunst Films + Links

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