Screenwriter, playwright, mother of two and Oscar-nominated actress Greta Gerwig turned 40 with a decisive bang. Gerwig wrote and directed a little film about a doll called Barbie, which became box office gold, and the highest-grossing film ever directed by a woman at $1.4 billion and counting.
Her steady rise in Hollywood, from directing indie films to heading up blockbusters, has not gone unnoticed. Gerwig wrote and directed Lady Bird in 2017 which won a Golden Globe award for Best Motion Picture and was nominated for numerous Academy Awards.
In 2018 she was named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in an essay penned by none other than Steven Spielberg. The following year she took the helm of the beloved film Little Women, also nominated for numerous Oscars with a win for Best Costume Design.
“Greta has a kind of momentum that feels like it must help contain a million good ideas from flying out of the atmosphere.” — Steven Spielberg
Barbie, which she co-wrote with husband Noah Bombach, has garnered eight Oscar nominations, and won a Golden Globe for Best Box Office Achievement, among a plethora of other awards and nominations for the 14th highest-grossing film of all time.
The monologue she penned for one of the film’s Oscar-nominated co-stars, America Ferrera, reads like a feminist anthem heralding a paradigm shift in the role of women in the arts.
“I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us,” Ferrera says as she describes the conundrums facing women, — and dolls — in today’s world.
“Gerwig, along with Taylor Swift, has had the most quantifiably successful year of any artist on the planet, creating a paradigm shift that brought people back to theaters just as Swift brought them back to stadiums.” — Vanity Fair
Known for creating and directing complex and intricate female characters, Gerwig’s aplomb as an actress serves her well in the director’s chair.
Gerwig’s first three directorial outings have knocked it out of the park, and don’t expect any less from her in the future. This year she is writing and directing Netflix’s adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia, and in the years to come she’s sure to continue to shine in Hollywood as a writer and director, a role she was truly made for.