Milena Markovna "Mila" Kunis (born August 14, 1983) is an American actress. Born in Chernivtsi, and raised in Los Angeles, she began playing Jackie Burkhart on the Fox television series That '70s Show (1998–2006) at the age of 14. Since 1999, she has voiced Meg Griffin on the Fox animated series Family Guy.
Kunis's breakout film role came in 2008, playing Rachel in the romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. She gained further critical acclaim and accolades for her performance in the psychological thriller Black Swan (2010), for which she received the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress, and nominations for the SAG Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her other major films include the action films Max Payne (2008) and The Book of Eli (2010), the romantic comedy Friends with Benefits (2011), the fantasy film Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) as the Wicked Witch of the West, and the comedies Ted (2012), Bad Moms (2016) and its sequel, A Bad Moms Christmas (2017).
Early life
Milena Markovna Kunis was born into a Ukrainian-Jewish family on August 14, 1983, in Chernivtsi, a city in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union (now Ukraine). Her mother, Elvira, is a physics teacher who runs a pharmacy, and her father, Mark Kunis, is a mechanical engineer who works as a cab driver. Kunis has an elder brother, Michael. Her grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Her mother tongue and the common language within her family is Russian. While participating in Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend Kunis confirmed she does not speak Ukrainian, stating Russian was the main language at the time she was there. Children were not taught Ukrainian in school until they were in second grade which was the time she left to come to the United States. She stated in 2011 that her parents had "amazing jobs", and that she "was very lucky" and the family was "not poor"; they had decided to leave the Soviet Union because they saw "no future" there for Mila and her brother. In 1991, when she was 7 years old, her family moved to Los Angeles, with US$250. "That was all we were allowed to take with us. My parents had given up good jobs and degrees, which were not transferable. We arrived in New York on a Wednesday and by Friday morning my brother and I were at school in L.A."
Kunis comes from a Jewish family and has cited antisemitism in the Soviet Union as one of several reasons for her family's move to the United States. She has stated that her parents "raised Jewish as much as they could", although religion was suppressed in the Soviet Union. On her second day in Los Angeles, Kunis was enrolled at Rosewood Elementary School, not knowing a word of English. She later recalled: "I blocked out second grade completely. I have no recollection of it. I always talk to my mom and my grandma about it. It was because I cried every day. I didn't understand the culture. I didn't understand the people. I didn't understand the language. My first sentence of my essay to get into college was like, 'Imagine being blind and deaf at age seven.' And that's kind of what it felt like moving to the States."
In Los Angeles, she attended Hubert Howe Bancroft Middle School. She used an on-set tutor for most of her high school years while filming That '70s Show. She briefly attended Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES), but when that school proved to be insufficiently flexible about her acting commitments, she transferred to Fairfax High School, graduating in 2001. She briefly attended University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Kunis has said that a genealogical DNA test described her ethnicity as 96% to 98% Ashkenazi Jewish.
