Background

Ethnicity: Hailee Steinfeld’s father is of Romanian Jewish and Russian Jewish ancestry. Hailee's maternal grandfather is the son of a Filipino father, Pastor "Peter" Loresca Domasin, from Panglao, Bohol, and of an African-American mother, Evelyn Olivia Bain, from California. Hailee's maternal grandmother's ancestry is English, German, Scottish, and Irish.

Hailee Steinfeld was born on December 11, 1996, in Tarzana, Los Angeles, California, the United States, to Cheri (Domasin), an interior designer, and Peter Steinfeld, a personal fitness trainer. She has a brother, Griffin. Her uncle is Jake Steinfeld, a fitness trainer, and her great-uncle is actor Larry Domasin. Hailee was raised in Agoura Hills and later in Thousand Oaks, California.

Steinfeld has said she caught the acting bug from watching her cousin (Emmy winner True O’Brien) star in TV commercials, but her mom insisted she take acting lessons for a year before she was allowed to begin auditioning.

Education

Steinfeld attended Ascension Lutheran, Conejo Elementary and Colina Middle schools (all in Thousand Oaks, California) before beginning a home-schooling program. (She celebrated her high school graduation in June 2015.) Her mom has credited a fourth-grade teacher, who recommended Steinfeld for a gifted arts program, with helping the family see her potential as an actress.

Career

Hailee Steinfeld began acting at the age of eight and appeared in several short films. She was a part of the award-winning short film She’s a Fox and played the character of Talia Alden.

At 14 years old, Steinfeld earned critical acclaim for her breakout role, playing Mattie Ross, a headstrong teen intent to track down her father’s killer in the 2010 Western True Grit. To land the coveted role (which she has said felt like winning the lottery), she auditioned for directors Joel and Ethan Coen in character, wearing a homemade 1800s-style costume. In the end, she beat out more than 15,000 other actresses to star alongside Hollywood heavyweights Jeff Bridges, Josh Brolin, and Matt Damon. She performed some of her own stunt work for the film. Playing an orphaned girl in search of her father's killer, Steinfeld was rumored to have beat out Kick-Ass star Chloe Grace Moretz and Mad Men's Kiernan Shipka for the part, leaving little doubt the young starlet would be the next big child star to take center stage in Hollywood. For her performance in the film, she received Oscar and BAFTA nominations and won numerous film critics awards, as well as a Young Hollywood Award for Breakthrough of the Year.

On the heels of True Grit’s success, Steinfeld was chosen to be the face of Italian fashion brand Miu Miu and was cast in 2011 to play Juliet Capulet in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Being that she was only 14 at the time, there was controversy over onscreen nudity in the script, which director Carlo Carlei said had to be revised to become more age-appropriate for the actress.

The film wasn’t released until 2013, the same year she appeared as Violet in the romance-drama Begin Again and as Petra Arkanian in the sci-fi action film Ender's Game. In 2014, she continued to show off her acting chops in films such as 3 Days to Kill, The Homesman and The Keeping Room.

Steinfeld joined the Pitch Perfect franchise as Emily Junk, in the musical comedy’s 2015 sequel, Pitch Perfect 2, which opened with the biggest box office tally ever recorded for a musical. Starring alongside Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, and Elizabeth Banks, Steinfeld sang in the film and ended up scoring a recording contract with Republic Records less than a week after the film’s release. (She also appeared in the 2017 follow-up, Pitch Perfect 3.)

She was cast as Eliza opposite Ender's Game co-star Asa Butterfield in the film adaptation of Ten Thousand Saints, which premiered on January 23, 2015, at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

Steinfeld, who made a cameo in Taylor Swift’s 2015 “Bad Blood” music video, found herself on the awards once circuit again in 2016, earning a Golden Globe nomination for her role of angsty teen Nadine Byrd in the coming-of-age comedy The Edge of Seventeen. The actress followed with voice work for the animated hit Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and a starring role in the Transformers movie Bumblebee, which both hit theaters in late 2018.

After signing with Republic Records, Steinfeld premiered her now-platinum debut single, "Love Myself" in August 2015, followed by an EP, Haiz, three months later. She went on to drop a series of standalone singles, including 2016’s “Rock Bottom” (with DNCE), ”Starving" (featuring Grey and Zedd) - which reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in December 2016 - as well as 2017’s “Most Girls” and "Let Me Go,” a track on which she collaborated with Alesso, Florida Georgia Line and Andrew Watt. She was also featured on Machine Gun Kelly’s “At My Best” in 2017 and appeared on the Fifty Shades Freed soundtrack with her song “Capital Letters” in 2018.

Describing her anxieties with transitioning from film to music, she told Marie Claire in 2018, “As an actor, I’m masked by characters, protected by them. But as a musician, it’s my story, my voice, my face. It’s such a different kind of vulnerable.”

After opening for Katy Perry during the U.K. leg of her Witness: The Tour in June 2018, Steinfeld hit the road with Charlie Puth on his Voicenotes Tour. With a full-length album said to be on the way, she was featured on rapper Logic's song "Ordinary Day," from his 2018 album, YSIV, and a remix of Drax Project's "Woke Up Late," which was released as a single in early 2019.

Achievements

• 

  Hailee Steinfeld earned a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination for her breakout role as tough-as-nails teen Mattie Ross in 2010’s True Grit when she was just 14 years old.
  
  After singing a cappella in Pitch Perfect 2, Steinfeld landed a record deal, released an EP, Haiz, and saw two of her singles (2015’s Love Myself and 2016’s Starving) go platinum. Steinfeld, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her role as angsty teen Nadine Byrd in 2016’s The Edge of Seventeen, went on to star in the 2018 Transformers movie Bumblebee.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • The Keeping Room

    (In this radically reimagined American Western set towards...)

    2014
  • The Homesman

    ("Set in 1854 in the harsh Nebraska frontier, a low-life d...)

    2014
  • 3 Days to Kill

    (In this heart-pounding action-thriller, Kevin Costner is ...)

    2014
  • Romeo and Juliet

    (Shakespeare's epic tale of romance has been revitalized f...)

    2013
  • 10, 000 Saints

    (Set in the 1980s, following tragedy, teenage Jude (Asa Bu...)

    2015
  • Pitch Perfect 2

    (Beca (Anna Kendrick), Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) and the Bard...)

    2015
  • Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

    ("Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" introduces Brooklyn t...)

    2018
  • Pitch Perfect 3

    (Now graduated from college and out in the real world wher...)

    2017
  • Hateship Loveship

    (A rebellious teen orchestrates a star-crossed romance bet...)

    2013
  • The Edge of Seventeen

    (An honest and hilarious coming-of-age comedy about an awk...)

    2016
  • Ender's Game

    (Ender's Game is an epic adventure starring Harrison Ford,...)

    2013
  • Begin Again

    (A disgraced record exec (Mark Ruffalo) forms a bond with ...)

    2013
  • True Grit

    (Following the murder of her father by hired hand Tom Chan...)

    2010
  • Charlie's Angels

    (The next generation of fearless angels takes flight! Star...)

    2019
  • Bumblebee

    (On a mission to protect Earth, the battle-scarred and bro...)

    2018
  • Term Life

    (A man takes out a life insurance policy to provide for hi...)

    2016
  • Unity

    (A study in the duality of man. Even after thousands and t...)

    2015
  • Barely Lethal

    (Jessica Alba and Samuel L. Jackson star in this teenage a...)

    2015

• music

  • Haiz 2015

Views

Steinfeld has endorsed a variety of charities, most of them are focused on improving children's lives. She supports No Kid Hungry, WE Movement, The Ryan Seacrest Foundation, Make a wish foundation, and many more. She also attended Breast Cancer Foundation's 2014 Hot Pink Party.

In 2016, Steinfeld participated in singing "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" with fellow singers and celebrities. The single raised money to aid New York City's homeless during the holiday season through "Robin Hood," a New York City organization that focuses on fighting poverty.

Quotations: "I want you to know that you control your destiny. You control your feelings. Don’t let others dictate how you feel about yourself. Don’t give them that power. Love yourself!"

"You must love yourself before you love another. By accepting yourself and fully being what you are, your simple presence can make others happy."

"I think growing up in a world where it’s so hard to be understood and heard in the right way, I’ve learned the importance of having self-love and self-confidence."

Personality

When Steinfeld worked with Matt Damon and Jeff Bridges, she made them put money into a “bad boy jar” every time they cursed. “I charged $5 dollars for the ‘f’ word and a dollar for all the other words,” Hailee told Access Hollywood. But the men retorted with a little rule of their own. “They were like, ‘This is not fair! You cannot do this!’ So, they decided right there they had to designate me a word. That (word) was ‘like’ So if I said the word ‘like,’ I had to pay 50 cents,” Hailee added. She ended up with $350 and donated it to an Alzheimer’s Foundation.

Interests

• photography

• Sport & Clubs

  basketball, soccer, football

• Music & Bands

  Troye Sivan, the Weeknd, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Adele, Lose Yourself by Eminem, I Wanna Dance with Somebody by Whitney Houston

Connections

A self-described “very private person,” Steinfeld rarely discusses her romantic life. In the past she was linked to Justin Bieber and Charlie Puth but denied the rumors, saying she was just friends with both men.

After months of posting photos together on social media, she and Instagram star Cameron Smoller made their public debut as a couple, posing together on the red carpet for a pre-Golden Globes event in January 2017. (She was nominated that year for her role in The Edge of Seventeen.) They reportedly broke up that November.

Rumors that the actress/singer was dating former One Direction band member Niall Horan began in January 2018 after the duo attended a performance of Hamilton in London and continued to spend time together. By the end of the year, it was confirmed that she and Horan - who once called her the “loveliest person on the planet” - had split.

In February 2018 Marie Claire cover story, Steinfeld said of her dating life, “I’m trying to protect myself and have a bit of a guard up, but I also want to fall in love and know why love hurts.”

Father:

Peter Steinfeld

Mother:

Cheri (Domasin) Steinfeld

Brother:

Griffin Steinfeld

ex-boyfriend:

Cameron Smoller

colleague:

Mark Ruffalo

colleague:

Harrison Ford

colleague:

Kevin Costner

colleague:

Hilary Swank

colleague:

Anna Kendrick

colleague:

Rebel Wilson

colleague:

Woody Harrelson

colleague:

Elizabeth Banks

colleague:

Nicolas Cage

colleague:

Liev Schreiber

colleague:

Kristen Stewart

References

• Hailee Steinfeld Official Site
• Hailee Steinfeld on Facebook
• Hailee Steinfeld on Instagram
• Hailee Steinfeld on Twitter