The Red Sparrow actress tells Bill Whitaker in an upcoming episode of 60 Minutes that reading a script was the first time she felt smart in her life

Jennifer Lawrence Reveals She Dropped Out of School at 14 and Doesn't Have a Diploma

Jennifer Lawrence burst onto the scene at just 20 with her first Oscar nomination and win two years later. But success at such a young age meant the actress never actually finished school.

The Red Sparrow actress tells Bill Whitaker in an upcoming episode of 60 Minutes that reading a script was the first time she felt smart in her life.

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“I struggled through school, I never felt very smart. And when I’m reading this script, and I feel like I know exactly what it would look like if somebody felt that way,” Lawrence, 27, recalls. “That was a whole part of my brain that I didn’t even know existed. Something that I could be confident in. And I didn’t want to let it go.”

She continues, “It’s so hard to explain, it was just an overwhelming feeling of, ‘I get this. This is what I was meant to do.'”

Not wanting to let her talent go meant that Lawrence had to convince her parents to let her pursue acting at the young age of 14 — and she never looked back.

“I dropped out of middle school. I don’t technically have a GED or a diploma. I am self-educated,” she says.

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But does she regret the decision? “No. I really don’t. I wanted to forge my own path. I found what I wanted to do and I didn’t want anything getting in the way of it. Even friends, for many years, were not as important to me as my career from the age of 14.”