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Emma Stone joins two-time Oscar winners' club

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Reuters

In &quot;Poor Things,&quot; Emma Stone embraced an offbeat challenge: playing a Victorian-era woman who dies by suicide, is brought back to life with the brain of her unborn child by a mad scientist and embraces a journey of bold self-discovery.Her risky, no-holds barred female take on the Frankenstein myth paid off, and Stone now has a second Academy Award for best actress on her shelf, putting her on par with legends like Meryl Streep, Jodie Foster and Elizabeth Taylor.The 35-year-old Arizona native took home the Oscar on Sunday, besting Lily Gladstone (&quot;Killers of the Flower Moon&quot;), Annette Bening (&quot;Nyad&quot;), Sandra Hueller (&quot;Anatomy of a Fall&quot;) and Carey Mulligan (&quot;Maestro&quot;).&quot;It&#x27;s not about me. It&#x27;s about a team that came together to make something greater than the sum of its parts,&quot; Stone said as she accepted her award.&quot;And that is the best part about making movies, it&#x27;s all of us together.&quot;Stone&#x27;s first Oscar came in 2017 for her turn as struggling actress Mia in dreamy musical romance &quot;La La Land,&quot; an ode to Hollywood&#x27;s Golden Age.But in &quot;Poor Things,&quot; directed by Greece&#x27;s Yorgos Lanthimos, she created a much more daring character in Bella Baxter.Bella at first speaks in a sort of pidgin English and gradually learns proper speech; she dances awkwardly, but with unbridled joy; and she is naked -- quite a lot -- as she gleefully explores the pleasures of what she calls &quot;furious jumping.&quot;But as she matures, Bella finds her newfound freedom threatened by men who are seduced by her nonconformism and yet want to possess her.Bella is without shame or judgment -- a trait that Stone has emphasized often as she has accepted a slew of awards in the run-up to the Oscars.&quot;Bella falls in love with life itself, rather than a person. She accepts the good and the bad in equal measure, and that really made me look at life differently,&quot; Stone said at the Golden Globes in January.<div>FRUITFUL CREATIVE PARTNERSHIP</div>Stone -- who now has four Oscar acting nominations and a fifth as producer of &quot;Poor Things&quot; for best picture -- has repeatedly said that this is her favorite role yet.&quot;Restarting from scratch, that was a very inspiring part of Bella,&quot; she said at the Globes. &quot;It was about unlearning things more than tapping into things from my past, which was really beautiful and very freeing.&quot;The film has cemented her collaboration with Lanthimos, who has become a sort of creative soulmate since they met nearly a decade ago.He directed her to her third Oscar nomination for &quot;The Favourite,&quot; a reimagining of English history in which she played a downtrodden servant who aspires to much more, and worms her way into Queen Anne&#x27;s heart and bed.The pair also worked on the 2022 short film &quot;Bleat,&quot; and have two more projects in development including &quot;Kinds of Kindness,&quot; the plot of which has been kept under wraps.Lanthimos calls Stone &quot;an incredible actress.&quot;&quot;It makes it so much easier to have someone there who trusts you so much, and who you trust so much,&quot; he told The Guardian in December.<div>FROM REALITY TV TO TWO OSCAR WINS </div>Born Emily Jean Stone in Scottsdale, Arizona on November 6, 1988 to a homemaker mother and businessman father, Stone began acting in youth theater in Phoenix -- in part to control her anxiety.At just 14 years old, she made a PowerPoint presentation entitled &quot;Project Hollywood&quot; to persuade her parents to allow her to drop out of school and pursue a movie career.The pitch worked -- she and her mother moved to Los Angeles, where Stone was home-schooled between auditions.She got her start on the VH1 talent search show &quot;In Search of the Partridge Family&quot; and actually won the role of Laurie Partridge over other contenders, but the subsequent sitcom died after one episode.After a series of bit roles on television, she made her big screen debut in 2007 in coming-of-age teen flick &quot;Superbad,&quot; co-written by Seth Rogen and produced by Judd Apatow.She has appeared in more than 25 movies since then, but really came to the fore as a major talent in &quot;The Help,&quot; Tate Taylor&#x27;s 2011 drama about the racism faced by Black maids in 1960s Mississippi.A string of hit films followed, including two &quot;Spider-Man&quot; movies, &quot;Crazy, Stupid Love&quot; and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu&#x27;s &quot;Birdman,&quot; which earned Stone her first Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.Then came &quot;La La Land&quot; and &quot;The Favourite.&quot;Stone has taken on some unexpected roles, including tennis legend Billie Jean King in &quot;Battle of the Sexes&quot; (2017), and Disney villain Cruella de Vil in 2021 prequel &quot;Cruella.&quot;On television, the actress, who is married to comedian and writer Dave McCary, has earned praise for two quirky TV shows -- &quot;Maniac&quot; and &quot;The Curse.&quot;The couple has one daughter, Louise.<div><a href="https://news.abs-cbn.com/entertainment/2024/3/11/hundreds-of-pro-palestinian-protesters-demonstrate-at-oscars-956">Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate at Oscars</a></div>© Agence France-Presse

In "Poor Things," Emma Stone embraced an offbeat challenge: playing a Victorian-era woman who dies by suicide, is brought back to life with the brain of her unborn child by a mad scientist and embraces a journey of bold self-discovery.

In "Poor Things," Emma Stone embraced an offbeat challenge: playing a Victorian-era woman who dies by suicide, is brought back to life with the brain of her unborn child by a mad scientist and embraces a journey of bold self-discovery.