Widely known for her natural charm, husky voice, and adaptability to a wide range of roles, American actress Emily Jean Stone was born on 8 November 1988 in Scottsdale, Arizona to Krista Jean Stone (née Yeager), a homemaker and Jeffrey Charles Stone, the founder and also the CEO of a general-contracting company. Although otherwise healthy, Emma had infantile colic when she was a baby, cried frequently for more than three hours a day, and consequently developing nodules on her vocal cords. Apart from that, as a child, she also suffered anxiety and bouts of panic attacks that continued for three years, which probably caused a decline in her social skills. Although she underwent therapy for the problem, it was her participation in local theatre plays that possibly helped cure the attacks.

Emma Stone was preliminary educated at Sequoya Elementary School and then attended Cocopah Middle Scholl for sixth grade. However, she did not like school, wanted to act since age four, and made her stage debut at the age of 11, playing Otter in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, as a member of the Valley Youth Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona.

During her freshman year in Xavier College Preparatory, she persuaded her parents to allow her to move to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, dropped out after one semester, and finally moved with her mother to an apartment in Los Angeles in January 2004, where she homeschooled by enrolling in online high-school classes and worked part-time at a dog-treat bakery, between auditions. Consequently, she had her TV breakthrough when she won the role of Laurie Partridge in a talent competition reality show in The New Partridge Family (2004), a pilot for a proposed television series, followed by several television shows like, Medium (2005) and Malcolm in the Middle (2006).

Emma Stone made her feature film debut as Jules in the commercially successful teenage comedy Superbad (2007), which she described as an amazing experience, and earned the Young Hollywood Award for Exciting New Face.

It was followed by her appearance as Amelia Stone, the bass guitarist in a band, in the commercial failure American comedy film The Rocker (2008), for which she had to learn to play the bass, and found it difficult to play a character whose personality was so different from her own, but received negative reviews from critics for her performance. Nevertheless, her next release, the romantic comedy The House Bunny (2008) performed better at the box office, and she was praised for her performance in the role of Natalie, the president of a sorority, a society for female students.

In the next year she appeared in three films, which include the romantic comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009), directed by Mark Waters, in which she played a ghost who haunts her former boyfriend, and also in Paper Man (2009), a comedy-drama which disappointed critics.

But her most financially profitable venture in that year was Zombieland (2009), in which she appeared as Wichita, a con artist, and was hailed by The Daily Telegraph as the hugely promising Stone. However, her breakthrough came in the next year with the leading role of Olive in the American teen romantic comedy film Easy A (2010), depicting the story of Olive Penderghast, a high school student who becomes involved in a comical sex scandal after a false rumour about her promiscuity. The critically acclaimed film established Emma as a star, and apart from winning the MTV Movie Award for Best Comedic Performance, she also earned a nomination for a BAFTA Rising Star Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for her performance in the film.

The next year, after a brief appearance as Kayla in the sex comedy Friends with Benefits (2011), Emma appeared alongside Ryan Gosling and Julianne Moore in the supporting role of Hannah, a law school graduate and the love interest of Jacob, played by Gosling in the well-received romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), for which she won the Choice Movie Actress: Comedy at the 2012 The Teen Choice Awards. After that, she was cast in Tate Taylor’s period film The Help (2011), her first experience outside comedy, in which she appeared as Skeeter Phelan, an aspiring author learning about the lives of the African-American housemaids, interviewing them to know about their experiences working for white families. Although she found the job challenging and had to learn to speak with a Southern accent, and know about the Civil Rights Movement, her performance in the film received positive reviews from critics.

After that, Emma Stone appeared in the commercially successful superhero movie The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), in which she played the role of Gwen Stacy, the love interest of the titular superhero, for which she was depicted as irresistible by the American film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly magazine based in New York City. Thereafter, she starred alongside Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn, playing the character of Grace Faraday, in the widely criticised crime thriller Gangster Squad (2013), set in Los Angeles during the 1940s. In 2014, apart from repeating her role of role of Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), Emma Stone also starred with Colin Andrew Firth, playing the role of Sophie in Woody Allen’s romantic comedy Magic in the Moonlight (2014).

However, Emma Stone was profusely acclaimed for her performance in her final film release of the year, the black comedy Birdman (2014), directed by the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, in which she appeared as Sam Thompson, the recovering-addict daughter of actor Riggan Thomson, played by Michael Keaton. While the film was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning four, Emma was depicted by The Daily Telegraph as super and tremendous in her role, for which she earned several nominations for best supporting actress, which include Academy, BAFTA, Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations.

After her success in Birdman, Emma appeared as Allison, an air force pilot alongside Bradley Cooper in the romantic comedy Aloha (2015), and also played the role of Jill Pollard, the love interest of Abe Lucas, a philosophy professor, played by Joaquin Phoenix, in Woody Allen’s Irrational Man (2015). However, although both the films were commercial failures, and her roles were panned by critics, she was cast by the French-American filmmaker Damien Sayre Chazelle in his musical comedy-drama La La Land (2016), as he was impressed by her performance in the role of Sally Bowles in her 2014 Broadway debut in Cabaret. In the film Emma appeared in the role of an aspiring actress Mia and her bittersweet romance with the Jazz pianist Sebastian, played by Ryan Gosling, and her mesmerizing performance in the role, with her huge doe eyes radiating intelligence, even when they are filling with tears, earned her the Academy, as well as a Golden Globe, SAG, and BAFTA Award for Best Actress.

Followed by her appearance as the famous tennis diva Billie Jean King in the sports comedy-drama film Battle of the Sexes (2017), Emma Stone appeared in the dark period comedy film The Favourite (2018), directed by the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, playing the role of Sarah Churchill, alongside Rachel Weisz as Abigail Masham, the two cousins fighting for the favour of Queen Anne. For her performance in the film, Stone received her third Oscar, and fifth Golden Globe nomination, along with a BAFTA and also a SAG nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Next year, she repeated her role as Wichita in Zombieland: Double Tap (2019), which received mostly positive reviews from critics.

Subsequent films of Emma Stone include crime comedy Cruella (2021), a Disney live-action based on the 1961 animation One Hundred and One Dalmatians, playing the role of Estella, who transforms herself into the raucous, revenge-bent Cruella de Vil, which garnered another Golden Globe nomination. After that, she portrayed the role of Bella Baxter, a young Victorian woman, crudely resurrected after her suicide by an eccentric scientist, played by Willem Dafoe, in the fantasy coming-of-age film Poor Things (2023), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Her fearless performance in the film, which includes nudity and several sex scenes, was critically acclaimed as wonderful, exploratory, almost lunar in its perfect oddness, and she won her second Academy Award, along with a BAFTA A, and a Golden Globe Award for her performance in the film.

In her personal life, Emma Stone dated her Paper Man co-star Kieran Kyle Culkin for two years, until she started dating her Amazing Spider-Man co-star Andrew Garfield in 2011. However, their relationship of four years ended on good terms in 2015. She met her future husband McCary for the first time in December 2016, when she was a guest host on Saturday Night Live and McCary was the segment director for the late-night show. Although the two tried to keep things under wraps, they had a public date night only a few days later, when they went to a Los Angeles Clippers game together in January 2019, and finally confirmed their engagement on 4 December 2019, after more than two years of dating. They married in 2020 and welcomed a baby girl on 3 March 2021.