Mila Kunis

Mila Kunis is an American actress whose career began in childhood and developed across network television, adult animation, studio comedy, action films, and prestige drama. Born Milena Markovna Kunis in Chernivtsi, in what was then the Ukrainian SSR, she immigrated to the United States with her family as a child and grew up in Los Angeles. After early commercials and guest roles, she became famous while still a teenager.

Kunis’s first major role was Jackie Burkhart on That ’70s Show, which ran from 1998 to 2006. Jackie could have been only a spoiled comic archetype, but Kunis made her vain, sharp, vulnerable, and increasingly self-aware as the series progressed. The role introduced her to a wide audience and became one of the defining teen-sitcom performances of the late 1990s and early 2000s. At nearly the same time, she began voicing Meg Griffin on Family Guy, a long-running role that gave her a second major television identity in animation.

After That ’70s Show, Kunis moved more aggressively into film. Her breakthrough as an adult film performer came with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, where she played Rachel Jansen with warmth and comic ease. The performance helped shift her public image from sitcom star to film lead and led to a run of studio comedies and genre projects, including Max Payne, The Book of Eli, Date Night, Friends with Benefits, Ted, and Oz the Great and Powerful.

Kunis received some of her strongest critical recognition for Black Swan. As Lily, she served as both rival and projection opposite Natalie Portman’s Nina, bringing looseness, sensual confidence, and ambiguity to the psychological thriller. The role earned nominations from major awards bodies, including the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild, and showed that Kunis could hold her own in darker, more stylized dramatic material.