Shailene Diann Woodley (born November 15, 1991) is an American actress. Born in San Bernardino, California, Woodley was raised in Simi Valley, and started modeling at the age of five and began acting professionally in minor television roles. She first gained prominence for her starring role as Amy Juergens in the ABC Family teen drama series The Secret Life of the American Teenager (2008–2013). She subsequently starred in the films The Descendants (2011) and The Spectacular Now (2013), receiving a nomination for her first Golden Globe Award for the former.
Woodley achieved wider recognition for her starring role as a teenaged cancer patient in the romantic drama The Fault in Our Stars (2014) and as Beatrice Prior in the science-fiction trilogy The Divergent Series (2014–2016). She played a sexual assault survivor in the HBO drama series Big Little Lies (2017–2019), for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award. She has since played supporting roles in the films Snowden (2016) and The Mauritanian (2021), and starred in Adrift (2018) and The Last Letter from Your Lover (2021).
Woodley is also an environmental activist. She is a Greenpeace Oceans Ambassador. She is a member of the Conservation International's Leadership Council and GoodLeap's Advisory Council. She also serves as a board member of the political action committee, Our Revolution and a co-founder of the nonprofit organization All it Takes.
Early life
Woodley was raised in Simi Valley, California. Both her parents are psychologists. Her mother, Lori (née Victor), is a middle school counselor, and her father, Lonnie Woodley, a former school principal, is a family therapist. She has a younger brother, Tanner.
Woodley was discovered by an agent while she was taking local theater classes. At the age of five, she began working in commercials, appearing in more than forty TV spots, including advertisements for Leapfrog, Hertz and a Honda minivan. She told The Hollywood Reporter that her parents only agreed to allow her to work professionally if she promised to adhere to three rules: "I had to stay the person they knew I was; have fun; and do good in school". Woodley was a 4.0 student, who took AP classes and graduated at Simi Valley High School. She considered studying Interior Design at New York University (NYU) but never had the chance to, as her acting career became more demanding since she signed on to star in The Secret Life of the American Teenager. She also took acting classes from Anthony Meindl.
At fifteen, she was diagnosed with scoliosis and was put in a chest-to-hips plastic brace for two years. Woodley told Us Weekly that "It's like wearing a tacky, disgusting, plastic corset for 18 hours a day. In the beginning, it was hard to eat or breathe. And I had to give up cross-country running. But I needed to have it to realign my spine".
