Mia Wasikowska (born 14 October 1989) is an Australian actress. After starting her career in Australian television and film, she first became known to a wider audience following her critically acclaimed work on the HBO television series In Treatment. She gained worldwide prominence in 2010 after starring as Alice in Tim Burton's $1 billion-grossing Alice in Wonderland and appearing in The Kids Are All Right, for which she received the Hollywood Awards' Breakthrough Actress Award.
In 2011, Wasikowska portrayed the title character in Cary Fukunaga's adaptation of Jane Eyre, and starred in Gus Van Sant's Restless, which premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. In addition to filming Rodrigo Garcia's Albert Nobbs and John Hillcoat's The Wettest County, she has also begun filming Park Chan-wook's Stoker, set for release in 2012.
Wasikowska was born and raised in Canberra, Australia, and is the middle child of three, with an older sister, Jess, and a younger brother, Kai. Her mother, Marzena Wasikowska, is a Polish-born photographer, while her father, John Reid, is an Australian photographer and collagist. In 1998, when she was eight years old, Wasikowska and her family moved to Szczecin, Poland for a year, after her mother received a grant to produce a collection of work based on her experience of having emigrated to Australia in 1974 at the age of eleven. Wasikowska and her siblings took part in the production as subjects; she explained to Johanna Schneller of the Toronto Globe and Mail in July 2010, "We never had to smile or perform. We weren't always conscious of being photographed. We'd just do our thing, and she'd take pictures of us." The family also traveled through France, Germany, and Russia during this period.
