From Ms. Lawrence’s interviews, her off-screen mugging, photo bombing and Marty Feldman-caliber eye popping, she doesn’t appear especially interested in playing the star; being human seems enough for now. That isn’t as easy as it sounds given how profoundly difficult it’s become for stars to have anything like a private life — to walk to a yoga class or pass out drunk in a friend’s car — without becoming fodder for tabloids and gossip sites. Some stars handle the lack of privacy disastrously, feeding the beast even as it eats them, while others turn their lives into performances that they deliver one item at a time, as Angelina Jolie brilliantly does. Many just smile and repeat the same canned answers about how thrilling it was to work with this other famous person.

Image Ms. Lawrence tripping last year on the way to collect her Oscar for her work in “Silver Linings.” Credit... Chris Pizzello/Associated Press

The only sister of two older brothers, Ms. Lawrence may come across like a natural, but her talent has been honed by almost a decade of experience as a working actor. At 14, while visiting New York, she was tapped by a modeling scout. She showed up on television in shows like “Cold Case” (as the daughter of a murdered woman) and “Medium” (in one episode, she played half of a daughter-mother double homicide) and emerged unscathed from a bad sitcom, “The Bill Engvall Show.” In 2008, she added three movies to her résumé, including “The Burning Plain” and another forgettable title, “Garden Party.” More important, there was the leading role in an interesting mess, “The Poker House,” a brutal, autobiographically inspired film from the actress turned director Lori Petty about growing up in a home in which her mother turned tricks.

In playing the oldest of three daughters of a drug-and-drink-wasted prostitute, Ms. Lawrence slipped into a part that felt like a template for her roles in “Winter’s Bone” and “The Hunger Games”: the fresh-faced, life-hardened survivalist forced to be the parent for her younger siblings and their zonked-out mother. In “The Poker House,” she makes out with her mother’s pimp and waves around a gun, is raped and almost immediately plays in a championship basketball game. Although she looks as young as her 14-year-old character, Ms. Lawrence also projects the kind of native toughness in the face of large and small threats that makes the film’s agonies endurable. You have to wonder if this resiliency is what Jodie Foster saw when she cast Ms. Lawrence in “The Beaver.”