Rosario Dawson

Rosario Dawson had previously been in a relationship with filmmaker Danny Boyle. In February 2017, she and comedian and actor Eric Andre announced that they were dating. However, they have broken up since then. In 2014, Dawson adopted a 12-year-old girl.

As a progressive feminist, she has been part of several documentaries, including ‘V-Day: Until the Violence Stops’ and ‘Miss Representation’. She received the Acting and Activism Award from the Women Film Critics Circle in 2014.

Born on May 9, 1979, in New York City, Rosario Dawson is the daughter of Isabel Celeste and Patrick C. Harris. Isabel, who is a writer and singer of Puerto Rican and Cuban ancestry, gave birth to Rosario when she was 16 years old.

Her mother later married construction worker Greg Dawson, who not only gave Rosario his name but also raised her as his own daughter. She has a younger half-brother named Clay.

When Rosario was five years old, her mother decided to settle the family in an abandoned building, a squat on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She, along with her husband, renovated one of the apartments as well as fixed the plumbing and electric wiring for the building.

As a result, they created their own affordable housing where they could raise their children. According to Dawson, that incident taught her the valuable life lesson that "if you wanted something better, you had to do it all yourself.”

Rosario Dawson made her first television appearance in an episode of the educational children's television series, ‘Sesame Street’. When she was 15 years old, photographer Larry Clark and filmmaker Harmony Korine saw her on her front-porch step. They approached her and told her that she would be perfect for a part in Korine’s next film.

In 1995, Dawson made her debut in the independent coming-of-age drama ‘Kids.’ It attracted a massive controversy upon its release with many critics labelling it exploitive, bordering on child pornography.

In 1997, she worked in the short film ‘Girls’ Night Out’ and a year later, she got the opportunity to share screen space with Denzel Washington in ‘He Got Game’. This was also her first collaboration with the acclaimed filmmaker Spike Lee.

In 1998, she also worked with Ismail Merchant and James Ivory in their comedy-drama ‘Side Streets’. In the next few years, she appeared in several small films that were not commercially successful.

Dawson played Will Smith’s love interest, Laura Vasquez, in ‘Men in Black II,’ a science fiction action comedy released in 2002. The second instalment in the ‘Men in Black’ film series, the movie also starred Tommy Lee Jones, Lara Flynn Boyle, and Johnny Knoxville. This was Dawson’s first box office success. Made on a $140 million budget, the film garnered $441.8 million. It helped Dawson find a solid footing in the industry.

Dawson made her small screen debut as a voice-over artist on ‘Robot Chicken’ in 2007. A year later, she appeared in 50 episodes of the web series ‘Gemini Division’. She hosted ‘Saturday Night Live’ in 2009 and acted in a telefilm called ‘Five’ in 2011. In 2018, she joined the cast of the CW’s comedy-drama television series ‘Jane the Virgin’.

Since 2015, Dawson has been playing Claire Temple in Marvel/Netflix TV shows. She first joined the cast of ‘Daredevil’ that year.

In May 2015, she signed a deal with Marvel that granted her the chance to appear on any Marvel show. Since then, Dawson has been part the main cast of all four Marvel shows on Netflix: ‘Daredevil,’ ‘Jessica Jones’, ‘Luke Cage’, and ‘Iron Fist’. She has also appeared in the 2017 miniseries ‘The Defenders’.