On August 29th, Hanna comes to Blu Ray and DVD, so what better time to look at the young, but already stellar, career of its leading lady; Saoirse Ronan.

There seems to be, right now, a glut of young female talent in Hollywood. We’ll likely come back to people like Elle and Dakota Fanning, Chloe Moretz and Hailee Steinfeld, but for most people – certainly those who saw Atonement – Saoirse Ronan is perhaps one of the most intriguing and one of the most obviously gifted young actors to have emerged in the past five years.

Born in New York, Saoirse Ronan moved back to Carlow in Ireland with her parents when she was just three. Her Father, Paul is also an actor (who took his young daughter with him on the set of The Devil’s Own when she was a year old), but it doesn’t seem that either he or Ronan’s mother Monica have been stage parents, pushing their daughter in front of a camera, indeed Saoirse has said of acting “It’s not work, it is more of a passion. It is so much fun and it is really makes you feel great at the end of the day. You feel like you are really after doing something good and you are after accomplishing something. Acting is one of these things that I can’t really describe – it’s just like, why do you love your mum and dad? You know, you just do. ”

Ronan got her first jobs in Irish TV series The Clinic and Proof, but made a big step up when, in 2005, she was cast in Amy Heckerling’s romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman, playing Michelle Pfeiffer’s 11 year old daughter. Unfortunately a fine performance (and the first in a series of note perfect accents) didn’t help rescue the film from two years sitting on the shelf, before it snuck out direct to DVD in 2007.

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