Johansson has two new films: “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” and “Under the Skin,” which is like nothing that Johansson buffs, or pretty much anyone else, have seen before. Photograph by Pari Dukovic

These are exciting times for Scarlett Johansson. In the past year, she has played the girlfriend of a porn addict, in “Don Jon”; she has played an operating system, using nothing but the honey of her voice, in “Her”; and she has seen her friend Scott Stringer become New York City Comptroller. It’s been one thrill after another. And now, on April 4th, she has two films coming out: “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” in which she resumes her role from “The Avengers” as Black Widow, a do-gooder who dresses like a dominatrix; and “Under the Skin,” in which she undresses to do bad, and which is like nothing that Johansson buffs, or pretty much anyone else, have seen before. In February, clad in Dior, bejewelled in Cartier, and accompanied by her fiancé, Romain Dauriac, she was awarded an honorary César—the French equivalent of an Oscar. “I’d never be so presumptuous as to say I could become a Frenchwoman,” she says. Give it time.

There is no getting away from Johansson, and that is how her uncountable fans, female as well as male, would like it to be forever. They do not want to get away. Even if they can’t afford to open a bottle of Moët & Chandon champagne, as endorsed by Johansson in 2011, they can still enjoy her likeness on the shell case of their iPhone 5, and come a little closer to her with a deep sniff of The One, the Dolce & Gabbana fragrance that the actress, as an official face of the fashion house, is paid to advertise. Ideally, we are informed, it should be “used to adorn pulse points or misted into the air.” She made a short film, in luscious black-and-white, as a means of encouraging us to buy the perfume. The director was Martin Scorsese, who, presumably, was attracted by its top notes of zesty bergamot and mandarin. And the co-star was Matthew McConaughey, one of Johansson’s few rivals, right now, in the stakes of global celebrity. As I said, exciting times; and she doesn’t even turn thirty until November. Oh, and one other thing. She’s pregnant.

The announcement was made on March 3rd, to much rejoicing, and a flurry of helpful predictions. E! Online put the question that everyone was asking: “Is there any doubt Scarlett Johansson is going to be one of the best moms ever?” The prospect of a baby is generally viewed as a blessing, but, when I met with Johansson a few days later, in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, I was under stringent instructions not to mention the good news. A friend of mine, ungallantly but correctly, called it the elephant in the womb. I had to suppress any natural urge to offer congratulations, let alone polite inquiries into the due date or the sex of the child. Throughout the conversation, a member of Johansson’s team sat in the corner, just in case I suddenly leaped to my feet, lunged toward the expectant mother with a bottle of gel, and tried to give her an ultrasound.

Would it be construed as trespass, therefore, to state that Johansson looks tellingly radiant in the flesh? Mind you, she rarely looks unradiant, so it’s hard to say whether her condition has made a difference. One of the few occasions on which Johansson’s radiance levels took a measurable drop came six years ago, during a previous pregnancy—a fictional one, true, but hefty with significance. In “The Other Boleyn Girl,” she played Mary Boleyn, the sister to the future queen of England and an appointed doe to King Henry VIII, who was, if we believe the film, barely distinguishable from a rutting stag. At one point, Anne (Natalie Portman) paid her a courtesy call. “Do you feel as awful as you look?” Anne asked. Try that approach as an interviewer, these days, and you, too, could end up minus a head.

In the event, at the Waldorf, no such harshness was required. “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,” the photographer, Pari Dukovic, said. I watched two male assistants, in denim shirts and matching baseball caps, one of whom repeatedly stepped forward to make tiny adjustments to her hair. Don’t we all need them in our lives? She stood in a striated green-and-black top, black pants, and heels that could have been pinched from Black Widow’s closet. “Give me nothing,” Dukovic said, and Johansson wiped the expression from her face, saying, “I’ll just pretend to be a model.” Pause. “I rarely have anything inside me.” Then came the laugh: dry and dirty, as if this were a drama class and her task was to play a Martini. Invited to simulate a Renaissance picture, she immediately slipped into a sixteenth-century persona, pretending to hold a pose for a painter and kvetching about it: “How long do I have to sit here for? My sciatica is killing me.” You could not wish for a more plausible insight into the mind-set of the Mona Lisa. A small table and a stool were provided, and Johansson sat down with her arms folded in front of her. “I want to look Presidential,” she declared. “I want this to be my Mt. Rushmore portrait.” Once more, Dukovic told her what to show: “Absolutely nothing.” Not long after, he and his team began to pack up. The whole shoot had taken seventeen minutes. She had given him absolutely everything.

“I always said I’d sleep when I’m dead, and yet here I am doing paperwork.” Facebook

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We should not be surprised by this. After all, film stars are those unlikely beings who seem more alive, not less, when images are made of them; who unfurl and reach toward the light, instead of seizing up, when confronted by a camera; and who, by some miracle or trick, become enriched versions of themselves, even as they ramify into other selves on cue. Clarence Sinclair Bull, the great stills photographer at M-G-M, said of Greta Garbo that “she seems to feel the emotion for each pose as part of her personality.” From the late nineteen-twenties, he held a near-monopoly on pictures of Garbo, so uncanny was their rapport. “All I did was to light the face and wait. And watch,” he said.

Why should we watch Johansson with any more attention than we pay to other actors? When did moviegoers come to realize that she was worth the wait, in gold? Well, there was Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (2008), which was loaded with physical gorgeousness, and lit with suitable fervor. There was one scene, at a champagne reception in a Spanish art gallery, where Johansson was, indeed, gilded to behold. She seemed to be made from champagne. But you need to wind back five more years, and to the colder skies of Japan, to find her moment—the exact point at which the public looked at her and discovered, to its consternation, that it could not look away. She may not have found fame with “Lost in Translation” alone, but it was certainly the time at which fame found her; the same year, she played Vermeer’s model, in “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” and was transfigured, by the movie’s final shot, into a work of art.

In “Lost in Translation,” directed by Sofia Coppola, Johansson was an unappreciated young wife who moseyed around Tokyo, surveying the unfamiliar with aplomb. Her deadpan demeanor, here as elsewhere, suggested that we should be summoned, not repelled, by things that we do not understand. If the opening shot was a sly joke, presenting us directly with Johansson’s backside, barely veiled in peach-colored underwear, the rest of the movie was dedicated to the principle that she would no longer be treated as a nice piece of ass. Fifteen minutes in, there was a breathtaking closeup of her face, as she applied lipstick; then, halfway through, came the karaoke scene. Johansson, on yet another sleepless night, wore a pink wig and sang along to “Brass in Pocket,” by the Pretenders. Having assured us—and Bill Murray, laid-back and gazing on—that she would use her arms, legs, style, sidestep, and so forth, she came to the crunch: