Dakota Fanning Biography

Birth name: Hannah Dakota Fanning

Date of Birth: February 23, 1994

An actor at heart, Georgia-raised Fanning started her career on the stage. Her fellow actors saw potential in the five-year-old actress and suggested she get an agent. She did, and the agent sent her to L.A. for six weeks, which soon turned into months and then years.

Dakota Fanning was born on February 23, 1994, in Conyers, Georgia. She landed her first commercial at 5 years old and earned a Screen Actors Guild Award for her work with Sean Penn on I Am Sam. She played Tom Cruise's daughter in the 2005 remake of War of the Worlds. She did a voice in the animated film Coraline based on a book by Neil Gaiman and she has featured in the Twilight film series.

Her face first hit the screen in a nationwide Tide commercial. She then landed guest roles in such primetime series as ER, Ally McBeal, The Practice, Malcolm in the Middle and Spin City. From television, Fanning took the leap into feature films starting with Tomcats (2001), followed by her award-winning performance as Lucy Diamond Dawson in I Am Sam (2001) opposite Sean Penn.

Fanning hasn't stopped working since. She completed two more films, Trapped and Sweet Home Alabama for 2002, followed by Steven Spielberg's acclaimed sci-fi mini-seres Taken and the features Uptown Girls (2003) and The Cat in the Hat (2003). In Man on Fire (2004), she stars opposite Denzel Washington as a little girl who needs a bodyguard, while in Hide and Seek (2004), she plays Robert De Niro's motherless daughter.

Child Star

Actress. Born Hannah Dakota Fanning on February 23, 1994, in Conyers, Georgia. She was born into an athletic family as the daughter of a minor league baseball player and a tennis player. Her mother enrolled Dakota in an acting class at an early age, and Fanning landed her first commercial at 5 years old.

Fanning first found success in commercials and on television. In 2000, she appeared on such programs as ER, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and The Practice. Fanning then earned a Screen Actors Guild Award for her work with Sean Penn in I Am Sam (2001). In the film, she played the daughter of a man with mental disabilities (Penn) who becomes the subject of a custody battle. Fanning's younger sister Elle also appeared in the film.