Mia Wasikowska (/ˌvʌʃɪˈkɒfskə/ VUSH-i-KOF-skə; born 25 October 1989) is an Australian actress. She made her screen debut on the Australian television drama All Saints in 2004, followed by her feature film debut in Suburban Mayhem (2006). She first became known to a wider audience following her critically acclaimed work on the HBO television series In Treatment. She was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female for That Evening Sun (2009). She gained worldwide recognition in 2010 after starring as Alice in Tim Burton\'s Alice in Wonderland and appearing in the comedy-drama film The Kids Are All Right, a role for which she received the Hollywood Awards Breakthrough Actress Award. She starred in the film Crimson Peak (2015), directed by Guillermo del Toro. The following year, she reprised her role as Alice in the fantasy film Alice Through the Looking Glass, and has since appeared in two critically successful independent films.\n', '

Wasikowska was born and raised in Canberra, Australia. She attended Cook Primary School, Ainslie Primary School and Canberra High School, and Karabar High School in Queanbeyan, which neighbours Canberra. She is the middle child of three, with an older sister, Jess, and a younger brother, Kai. Her mother, Marzena Wasikowska, is a Polish-born photographer, while her father, John Reid, is an Australian photographer and collagist. In 1998, when she was eight years old, Wasikowska and her family moved to Szczecin, Poland, for a year, after her mother had received a grant to produce a collection of work based on her own experience of having emigrated from Poland to Australia in 1974, at the age of eleven. Wasikowska and her siblings took part in the production as subjects; she explained to Johanna Schneller of The Globe and Mail in July 2010, "We never had to smile or perform. We weren\'t always conscious of being photographed. We\'d just do our thing, and she\'d take pictures of us."\n', '

At the age of nine, Wasikowska began studying ballet with Jackie Hallahan at the Canberra Dance Development Centre, with hopes of going professional. She began dancing en pointe at thirteen, and was training 35 hours a week in addition to attending school full-time. Her daily routine consisted of leaving school in the early afternoon and dancing until nine o\'clock at night. A spur on her heel hampered her dancing. Her passion for ballet also waned due to the increasing pressure to achieve physical perfection and her growing dissatisfaction with that world in general, and she quit at fourteen. However, she credits ballet with improving her ability to handle her nerves in auditions.\n', '

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