SHE is set to scoop her second Oscar at tomorrow night’s awards, but Emma Stone has had to overcome her demons to become the toast of Hollywood.
The 35-year-old actress has suffered lifelong anxiety, bouts of obsessive compulsive disorder and a meltdown in her twenties that forced her to take a short break from movie roles.
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And it is unlikely the Poor Things star is expecting her name to be announced as the winner of the Best Actress gong at the glitzy Beverly Hills ceremony as she still struggles with self-doubt.
Emma said: “I have impostor syndrome. I don’t think that any of this will or has ever felt normal in any way . . . it never feels like, ‘Yeah, I knew that was going to happen’.”
It is a strongly contested category, with Emma up against Killers Of The Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone, Maestro’s Carey Mulligan, Annette Bening for Nyad and Sandra Huller for Anatomy Of A Fall.
But mum-of-one Emma is tipped to win for her role as Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’s off-beat comedy after she triumphed at last month’s Bafta Film Awards.
Emma, who grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, had always dreamed of becoming an actress despite her anxiety, telling her mother Krista at seven years old: “If I don’t get to act I will die.”
She was catapulted to worldwide fame as Gwen in hit superhero films The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012 and sequel The Amazing Spider-Man 2 a couple of years later.
But back-to-back filming in her mid-twenties left the star feeling “burnt out” and she even contemplated giving up acting altogether.
‘I was losing the love’
She explained: “I started sort of melting down. I made four films, and I turned 25 that year.
“I felt really burnt out and like I was losing the love of what I did and what I wanted to do.
“I had seen people in my family do that. I had family members who started businesses because they loved something and in overworking it they started to stop loving the thing that they loved because it turned into work and it scared the s**t out of me.
“It really scared me, because I was only 25 and I started feeling disillusioned in a way that freaked me out. So I took a little time and ended up doing Cabaret on stage and that reinvigorated my love of acting in general.”
Emma’s Broadway debut in the 2013 revival of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Cabaret caught the eye of film director Damien Chazelle, who begged her to play Mia in La La Land.
The 2016 smash-hit musical, which also starred Ryan Gosling, landed Emma her first Best Actress Oscar.
She has also been nominated for Birdman and The Favourite.
Despite her success and estimated £31million fortune, Emma lives a down-to-earth lifestyle with her comedian husband Dave McCary, 38, and their two-year-old daughter Louise Jean in Austin, Texas.
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She told American podcast Shameless: “I don’t have a computer at all any more. I have an iPhone but it is a really cracked one.
“I do email on my phone, and I just type with my thumbs. I don’t have any social media.”
She still finds it awkward to talk about her career and sometimes describes herself as “self-employed” rather than an actress.
She has said: “Typically I’m like, ‘This is so silly, this is a job playing dress up’, but I always feel embarrassed saying it is a hard job, because even when days are long or challenging, it is such a fun job and a joyous job.
“But sometimes it’s a little embarrassing to say you’re an actor on the forms you fill out. I’m like ‘self-employed’.”
Emma has previously been open about her long-term struggles with OCD and anxiety.
I always feel embarrassed saying it is a hard job
She has said: “I have an actual OCD issue so when I was growing up, anything that could be measured I was obsessed with acing, like tests, report cards, anything that you can. For instance, I played flute. In band class you have to choose an instrument and I was terrible at the flute.
“I can’t play the flute, but I was first chair because I tried to do it exactly correctly.”
Emma was just six when she was given a role in the school play among a cast of ten-year-olds.
She said: “My teacher, I think, suggested me because I was so loud and such a performer at heart, which was a really big deal because all the other kids were older.
“It was very cool. So that was a great feeling.
“I really vividly remember going on stage for the first time. It was like heaven to me — it was so incredible.
MENTAL HEALTH BATTLE
“And then the next year I started having panic attacks.
“I had a really intense anxiety disorder as a kid and a lot of panic attacks, and I was stuck at home for a couple of years, and I went to school and everything, but I was really struggling.
“I started doing therapy as a kid and worked through a lot of that.
“I asked to audition for a youth theatre and my mum was really kind of reticent as it was far away from our house but eventually she was like, ‘OK, OK, you’re you and I guess it’s just good that my deeply anxious daughter wants to do something like this’.
“It’s like the shy kid joining the debate team. The anxious kid doing a play on stage. And that was it — acting was and continues to be a form of meditation to me.
“It is obviously different when you are doing it professionally and there’s that pressure on you to deliver in a way, but at the same time it requires you to be present. That’s what you do when you meditate or you try and get out of anxiety, so I find it very soothing even when it is challenging, even more so now when it is challenging.”
I had a really intense anxiety disorder as a kid and a lot of panic attacks
Emma’s parents Jeff, the founder of a general contracting company, and her mother Krista, a housewife, gave her their blessing when she asked to move to Los Angeles to pursue acting at just 15 years old.
During her acceptance speech at last month’s Bafta Film Awards, Emma thanked her mother, saying: “She’s always made me believe this kind of crazy idea I could do something like this.”
She told another podcast: “It is pretty crazy to have parents that were like, ‘OK, let’s give this a shot’.
“And that was a huge boost in me even attempting to do this at the age that I did. I think a lot of actors are not in that position, where they are feeling the support of their family.”
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To play Bella Baxter — a dead woman who is brought back to life and undergoes a brain transplant with her unborn baby — in Poor Things, Emma swapped her striking red hair for dark brown, and she reckons the colour of her locks has played an important role in landing her acting roles.
She explained: “I was born blonde. All of the things that I was auditioning for at that time, all the roles for 15-year-old girls were a lot of blonde cheerleadery roles and I didn’t fit those very well, so I thought if I dyed my hair brown it would really set me apart. I didn’t get any parts after that either.”
But after auditioning for 2007 coming-of-age drama Superbad, director Greg Mottola suggested she become a redhead.
Emma said: “So we dyed my hair red and the rest is . . . ”
The rest, most certainly, is history.