Dakota Johnson Biography

Dakota Johnson is the actress best known for playing a shy sexual adventuress in the 2015 film Fifty Shades of Grey.

Born in 1989, Dakota Johnson was a child of Hollywood: her mother was actress Melanie Griffith, and her father was Don Johnson, the star of the groundbreaking TV cop series Miami Vice. (Her parents divorced in 1996, and Griffith remarried to actor Antonio Banderas.)

Dakota was 10 when she made her film debut in Crazy in Alabama (1999), a drama directed by Antonio Banderas. In her late teens Johnson began modeling, notably for Mango jeans, but she really grabbed attention for her small role in the 2010 movie The Social Network; she played the Stanford student who woke up to realize she’d been sleeping with notorious bad boy Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake).

Dakota Johnson was Kate in the short-lived sitcom Ben and Kate (2012-13) and appeared in the feature films 21 Jump Street (2012) and Need for Speed (2014) before grabbing one of the most coveted roles of the era: the lead in Fifty Shades of Grey, the 2015 film based on the best-selling erotic novel by E.L. James.

Johnson was cast as Anastasia Steele, a mousy literature student who embarks on sexual adventures with wealthy control freak Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan). The film was released in 2015, and Johnson starred in the two sequels, Fifty Shades Darker (2017) and Fifty Shades Freed (2019), shortly afterwards.

Since then, Johnson has appeared in several productions (and started her own production company), and has become a tabloid favorite, in part because of red carpet appearances and in part because her boyfriend is Chris Martin of the band Coldplay (and Gwyneth Paltrow‘s ex).

Johnson’s films include Suspiria (2018), The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019, starring Shia LaBeouf) and the sick-with-cancer melodrama Our Friend (2019, with Casey Affleck).