Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence didn't complete high school or even middle school, she revealed to Bill Whitaker on this Sunday's 60 Minutes, dropping out of school at 14 to pursue acting full force. 'I struggled through school. I never felt very smart,' she explained. 'And when I'm reading a script, and I feel like I know exactly what it would look like if somebody felt that way, that was a whole part of my brain that I didn't know existed. It's something that I could be confident in, and I didn't want to let it go.'
'It's so hard to explain [what I wanted so much],' she continued. 'It was just an overwhelming feeling of 'I get this. This is what I was meant to do.' And to get people to try to understand that when you're 14 years old, wanting to drop out of school and do this and your parents are just like, 'You're out of your mind.''
Whitaker asked her straight up if she ever finished high school. 'I dropped out of middle school. I don't technically have a GED or a diploma. I am self-educated. No, [I don't regret that]. I really don't. I wanted to forge my own path. I found what I wanted to do and I didn't want anything getting in the way of it. And even friends, for many years, were not as important to me as my career, I mean from the age of 14.'
Lawrence would become one of Hollywood's bona fide movie stars, earning multiple Oscar nominations and the spot as the third highest paid actress in 2017 with £17m earned. She recently told Entertainment Tonight that she'd be taking a break from acting to focus on activism. 'I'm going to be working with this organisation as a part of Represent.Us ... trying to get young people engaged politically on a local level,' she said. 'It doesn't have anything to do with partisan [politics],' Lawrence said of her involvement with the non-profit organisation. 'It's just anti-corruption and stuff trying to pass state by state laws that can help prevent corruption, fix our democracy.'
Her rep told Entertainment Weekly, though, that the year-long break Lawrence mentioned to ET isn't actually happening. Lawrence will return to work when one of several projects in development is ready to go. EW notes per her IMDB, she has seven projects in development, including an untitled film she's writing and starring in with Amy Schumer and Ron Howard's Zelda Fitzgerald biopic Zelda.
Alyssa Bailey is the senior news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton). She previously held positions at InStyle and Cosmopolitan. When she's not working, she loves running around Central Park, making people take #ootd pics of her, and exploring New York City.
