Known for her roles in Killers of the Flower Moon and Certain Women, Lily Gladstone, the first Native American nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 2024.
Born in 1986, Gladstone lived on the reservation of the Blackfeet Nation until she was 11. “There is poverty, violence, substance abuse, and unemployment everywhere. But there is so much love in that community. What unites people there is a love of family, a love of land.” Gladstone once said.
Her first acting role as a child was an evil stepsister in a Children’s Theatre performance of Cinderella. Gladstone graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and a minor in Native American Studies.
Before taking her first acting role in Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, Gladstone joined a theatre called Living Voices, where they visited schools to educate children about forgotten or overlooked histories.
A year later, she got her second role in a film about a Native American man who lives in a small Montana town.
In an interview, Gladstone talked about how this film, Winter in the Blood, reflects the hard life of the Montana community, she said, “Winter in the Blood relied so heavily on the Montana community, so many locals, and so many people who have a strong connection with the legacy of the novel.”
In summer 2020, Gladstone was considering leaving acting to work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. However, she received a meeting request from Scorsese, which led to her being cast in Killers of the Flower Moon.
In the film, Gladstone and some other cast members, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, had to learn lines in Osage. In a 2023 interview with People magazine, Gladstone talked about her role in Killers of the Flower Moon and how learning Osage influenced her performance as Mollie. She said, “Speaking Osage changed the way that Mollie moved. It took months to get comfortable with the different pace of speaking.”
Gladstone keeps her personal and romantic life private. She openly identifies as queer and uses multiple terms to describe her orientation, she described that once in an interview saying, “I can’t put a label on it.”
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