Opinion: How Scarlett got interesting

Scarlett Johansson used to play only cartoonish vamps, but something's changed. Anne Billson salutes the blossoming career of an actress who's found her oomph

It's not Scarlett Johansson's fault that I used to hate her. Thanks to the vagaries of film distribution, there was a fateful week in 2006 when I couldn't go near a cinema without her face looming up. Here she was as a student journalist in Woody Allen's Scoop! There she was as a girlfriend in Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia! And there she was again, a magician's assistant, in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige!

I was sick of the sight of her, particularly as she was miscast in all three films, though in Scoop and The Black Dahlia (for which even she admitted she was "physically wrong") she was far from being the only bad casting choice. But it was as though the Lords of Hollywood had decreed she was the Girl of the Moment, and thus had to play every female character that came along, whether it suited her or not.

But there was something missing in her performances. In the hardboiled world of The Black Dahlia, she was like a schoolgirl modelling her grandma's wardrobe. Was it the va-va-voom figure, the joyously pneumatic alternative to the usual stick-insect school of starlet, or the voice, a husky femme fatale drawl that sounded as though she smoked 60 Chesterfields a day, which blinded filmmakers to the fact that she was still girlish, without the life experience to give depth to those juicy roles? After all, they might have said, she was already a veteran. She'd been in films since the age of nine.

Born in New York in 1984 to a Danish-born father and an Ashkenazi mother, Johansson made her screen debut in Rob Reiner's North. A few years later, Robert Redford, who directed and acted with her in The Horse Whisperer, famously declared that she was "13 going on 30". The Coen brothers evidently agreed, casting her as the innocent-looking schoolgirl pianist whose lewd advances towards Billy Bob Thornton cause him to crash his car in The Man Who Wasn't There.

But in 2001, fine as she was as Thora Birch's best friend in Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, it was Birch whom everyone was tipping for the brilliant future. Which just goes to prove William Goldman's maxim that, when it comes to predictions about the movies, "nobody knows anything".

Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola's art-house hit, changed everything. Johansson held her own opposite Bill Murray, but it helped that Coppola had cast her astutely, as a slightly naive young wife, and created an indelible image with the film's opening shot of the actress's derrière in see-through knickers.

She gave a watchful performance as the painter's model in Girl with a Pearl Earring, though the film was too hung up on its own prettiness to care, but in Match Point, her first film with Allen (who described her as "sexually overwhelming"), she was cast as an impossible-to-play cartoon vamp who morphs overnight into a pathetic ninny, and Michael Bay's The Island reinforced the impression there was less to her than met the eye.

After that 2006 ScarJo overdose, she was more interestingly cast as the less vampish of the sisters in the disappointingly bland The Other Boleyn Girl; upstaged by her co-stars in Vicki Cristina Barcelona, the most tolerable of her three films with Allen; going straight from yoga class to swimming pool without showering (a fitness club faux pas!) in the ensemble rom-com He's Just Not That Into You.

And then something happened: she became interesting. It was hard to resist her as Black Widow, cracking wise and kicking ass in skin-tight black leather in Iron Man 2 and Avengers Assemble - the latter film, especially, allowing her to shine in a testosterone-heavy line-up. She'll be playing the character again in next year's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, though it's symptomatic of the Marvel Universe that we have yet to see a film called Black Widow.

But, more tellingly, in We Bought a Zoo she brought such unexpected depth to a bland girlfriend role it made you wish you were watching her story, not Matt Damon's. Her sassy Janet Leigh was one of the highlights of Hitchcock; her brassy controlling Barbara is the highlight of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Don Jon; and her extraordinary performance in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (opening in 2014) is clearly the work of an actress who is endlessly curious and willing to take risks in her career.

Perhaps it was her work in live theatre that gave her that extra oomph. She won a Tony for her part as Catherine in A View from the Bridge in 2009 ("Ms Johansson melts into her character so thoroughly that her nimbus of celebrity disappears", wrote one critic), and earlier this year played Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, again to good reviews.

Or was it hanging with musicians in her recording career, which shows more evidence of good taste (one of her two albums is a collection of Tom Waits covers) than of singing ability? Might it have had something to do with her private life? She was briefly married to Ryan Reynolds, and has dated Benicio del Toro (17 years her senior) and Black Dahlia co-star Josh Hartnett.

Or is it simply that the actress named by Esquire this year as "Sexiest Woman Alive" finally grew into that figure and voice. That voice especially - she's such obvious casting as Samantha, the Siri-like operating system in Spike Jonze's Her, it's hardly surprising Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with it. She's already directed a short, and there's a feature-directing debut on the cards, an adaptation of Truman Capote's Summer Crossing. But whatever the reason for her blossoming, and whatever she does next, I'm looking forward to it. - ©The Daily Telegraph, London