By the numbers: Can you believe it? Kiwi Oscar-winner Anna Paquin is 40

Happy birthday Anna Paquin.

Yes, the first millennial to win an acting Oscar is turning 40 in Hollywood today (July 24).

Although Canadian-born, she was raised in New Zealand, attending Lower Hutt’s Raphael House Rudolf Steiner School when she was chosen ahead of 5000 other auditionees (including her older sister Katya) to play Flora in Jane Campion’s New Zealand-shot period drama The Piano (despite her only previously acting experience being playing a skunk in a school play).

It has led to a three-decade career on screens both big and small, working with everyone from Steven Spielberg to Martin Scorsese and Pixar.

Here’s a by-the-numbers breakdown of some of the highlights of Paquin’s career.

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11

That was how old Paquin was when she captured global attention – and hearts.

Nobody really expected the Wellington schoolgirl and The Piano star to win the 1994 award for Best Supporting Actress, when she was up against Holly Hunter, Emma Thompson, Rosie Perez and Winona Ryder, least of all the young lady herself.

So when she arrived at the podium, she was reduced to a breathless, speechless bag of nerves, endearing herself to both the gathered crowd and millions of viewers around the world.

Honoured for her performance as Flora in Jane Campion’s The Piano, her first-ever screen role, she became the second-youngest actor ever to receive the accolade. Tatum O’Neal won for Paper Moon in 1974, when she was 10.

Looking back on that moment, Paquin told Stuff in 2019, she now compares it to “looking at a photo album of when you were little”.

“I have that experience of thinking, ‘do I remember that birthday, or have I just looked at that picture enough times?'”

7

The number of seasons Paquin spent playing Louisiana barmaid Sookie Stackhouse (she won a Golden Globe for her performance in the role in 2009). Produced and created by Six Feet Under’s Alan Ball, True Blood was based a series of novels by Charlene Harris and ran for 80 episodes between 2008 and 2014.

While Sookie’s superpower was an ability to read minds, the character struck a chord with audiences across the globe because of her empathy towards fellow outsiders. Even Snoop Dogg himself was a fan, releasing the song Oh Sookie (“I wanna do bad things with you, I wanna do real bad things with you”) in 2010.

The show was also where she met and fell in love with co-star Stephen Moyer, her husband of nearly 12 years and father of her nine-year-old twins Charlie and Poppy.

4

How many appearances Paquin made as Anne Marie LeBeau aka Rogue in the long-running X-Men series of movies.

Introduced in the 2000 original, she returned for the second and third parts of the trilogy, but the character, whose mutant ability was being able to absorb the memories, knowledge, talents, personality and physical abilities of another human being, was increasingly sidelined.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be afraid of your powers… afraid to get close to anybody,” she laments in 2006’s The Last Stand.

Came back for a cameo in the time-travelling 2014 tale Days of Future Past, one that was expanded in a later version, appropriately nicknamed The Rogue Cut.

27

The age difference between herself and the actor she co-starred with in two films – Jeff Daniels.

In 1996’s charming family film Fly Away Home, they played father-and-daughter. Nine years later, they were lovers in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale.

For his part, Daniels said in an interview during promotion for Squid that the pair coped with filming the sex scene by trying “not to think about…you know, geese”.

100%

Her highest Rotten Tomatoes rating – for Moyer’s directorial debut, 2018’s The Parting Glass.

Paquin stars alongside Melissa Leo, Cynthia Nixon, Ed Asner and Rhys Ifans in this intimate drama about siblings who recall memories of their recently deceased sister when they gather to collect her belongings. “It’s the kind of film that unfolds with the warm, deliberate intimacy of a good play,” wrote Variety’s Guy Lodge.

It’s a far cry from the 4% rating accumulated by Paquin’s 2002 horror Darkness. “The kind of monstrous misfire that makes your mind ache and your teeth grind,” wrote The Austin Chronicle’s Marc Savlov when it eventually slunk into cinemas in late 2004.