Mira Katherine Sorvino is an Americon actress, who has been awarded the Academy Award and Golden Globe.
Background
Ethnicity:
Sorvino is of Italian descent on her father's side.
Mira Sorvino is the daughter of veteran character actor Paul Sorvino, who discouraged her from becoming an actor, as he knew how the industry often chews up young stars. The young Sorvino was intelligent, an avid reader and an exceptional scholar.
Education
At a young age, Sorvino wrote and acted in backyard plays with her childhood friend Hope Davis, in theater productions at Dwight-Englewood School, and at Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude in East Asian Studies.
Her thesis was dedicated to racial conflict in China, it was written and researched during the year spent in Beijing, which helped her fluency in Mandarin Chinese.
Career
Mira Sorvino showed interest in a career in acting from an early age, and moved to New York City to try her hand in the City's film industry, waitressing, auditioning and working at the Tribeca production company of Robert De Niro. She succeeded in getting a little television work in the early 1990s, but got her first film job in the independent gangster movie Amongst Friends (1993), on which she worked her way up the ladder behind the camera to eventually associate-produce the film, and, more importantly, was eventually cast as the female lead.
An exceptionally poised and articulate young woman, she may have seemed inappropriate to play a crazy hooker, but Woody Allen took the chance, and her magnificent performance as the female lead in his Mighty Aphrodite (1995) proved her range as a performer and earned her an Oscar (at the tender age of 29) for Best Supporting Actress. Since winning the Oscar, Sorvino has continued to take a wide range of roles, including another stretch as Marilyn Monroe in Norma Jean & Marilyn (1996) (TV), co-starring with another very intelligent and skilled young actress, Ashley Judd. Forays into action and horror, such as Mimic (1997) and The Replacement Killers (1998) show that Sorvino is not above being playful in the film roles she chooses.
She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Mighty Aphrodite (1995) and is also known for her role as Romy White in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion.
In 2005, she received a Golden Globe nomination for her role as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in the Lifetime film Human Trafficking.