Milena Markovna "Mila" Kunis[nb 1] (/ˈmiːlə ˈkuːnɪs/; born August 14, 1983) is an American actress. In 1991, at the age of seven, she moved from the Soviet Union to Los Angeles with her family. After being enrolled in acting classes as an after-school activity, she was soon discovered by an agent. She appeared in several television series and commercials, before acquiring her first significant role prior to her 15th birthday, playing Jackie Burkhart on the television series That '70s Show. In September 1999, she began voicing Meg Griffin on the animated series Family Guy.
Her breakout film role came in 2008, playing Rachel Jansen in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Subsequent film roles included Mona Sax in Max Payne, Solara in The Book of Eli, Jamie in Friends with Benefits, Lori in the comedy Ted, and Theodora in Oz the Great and Powerful. Her performance as Lily in Black Swan gained her worldwide accolades, including receiving the Premio Marcello Mastroianni for Best Young Actor or Actress at the 67th Venice International Film Festival, and nominations for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role.
Kunis was born in Chernivtsi, in the Ukrainian SSR (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 named Michael (born c. 1976). She stated in 2011 that her parents had "amazing jobs", and that the family was "very lucky" and "not poor"; they had decided to leave the USSR because they saw "no future" there for Kunis and her brother. In 1991, when she was seven years old, her family moved to Los Angeles, California with $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 LA."
Kunis comes from a Jewish family and has cited antisemitism in the former Soviet Union as one of several reasons for her family's move to the United States.[9][10][11] She has stated that her parents "raised [her] 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. When not on the set, she attended Fairfax High School, from which she graduated in 2001. She briefly attended UCLA and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
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