Dakota Johnson is becoming something of a Valentine’s Day staple. Last year, she played the virginal protagonist Anastasia Steele in _Fifty Shades of Gre_y. Now Johnson is back on the big screen and going for deliberate laughs in Christian Ditter’s sexually empowering buddy comedy, How to Be Single. While we’ve grown accustomed to her characters finding their footing in the bedroom, what do we really know about our favorite Valentine’s Day siren? Here, five things you likely never knew about Dakota Johnson.
1. Not only is Dakota Johnson the daughter of actors Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, but her grandmother, Tippi Hedren, is also Hollywood royalty. Hedren made her big film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror classic The Birds and went on to star in Marnie the following year. Johnson told Interview magazine that despite people’s fascination with her illustrious family history, it’s not something she’s necessarily keen to talk about. “I’ve come to understand the allure of that to other people, how it seems so interesting and different,” Johnson said in 2012. “But for me it’s just my family, it’s the way I grew up, and it’s my mom and my dad. It doesn’t really bother me because I get it, but sometimes it’s kind of a drag to talk about.”
2. Johnson’s parents were initially wary of her decision to pursue acting. “At first my parents were like, ‘No fuckin’ way!’ ” Johnson once told AnOther magazine. “But I think they knew they didn’t really have an option.” She eventually auditioned for the acting program at Juilliard, but did not make the cut. The silver lining, however, is that the Fifty Shades of Grey star has a really remarkable rejection story. “They said, ‘We’ll ask 4 out of 150 of you to sing.’ I thought, ‘God, that sucks for those guys,’ ” Johnson said. “I went in so nervous, and my comedic monologue was one that Steve Martin wrote. They didn’t think it was funny. At all. And then, of course, they asked me to sing. So I just sang the song in my head, which was ‘Nude’ by Radiohead because In Rainbows had just come out. It was so awkward. I was just wailing and they stopped me and said, ‘Thanks for coming.’ ”
3. While Johnson’s first on-screen role was in her mother’s film Crazy in Alabama, her big break came in 2006, when she served as that year’s Miss Golden Globe. The Golden Globe honor, it turns out, was also a family affair: Thirty-one years prior, Griffith was Miss Golden Globe, too. Griffith and Johnson are the only mother-daughter pair in history to have the distinction.
4. Johnson’s small role in David Fincher’s The Social Network might have actually precipitated her biggest break: getting the attention of Fifty Shades of Grey director Sam Taylor-Johnson. “She was a bit of a scene-stealer,” Taylor-Johnson told Vogue. “It was one of those little appearances where you think, I need more of that girl!” When Johnson auditioned for the role of Anastasia Steele, she performed a monologue from Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 sexually explicit film Persona. “She blew us out of the water,” Taylor-Johnson continued. “She understood the nuance of that passage and how to play something delicately. Dakota has the ability to play so fragile and vulnerable, but with this underlying strength that makes you feel she is going to triumph.” Johnson later said that the content of the monologue didn’t faze her. “I don’t have any problem doing anything,” Johnson said. “The secret is I have no shame.”
