Born December 11, 1996 in Thousand Oaks, California, Hailee Steinfield is an American teen actress best known for playing Mattie Ross in the 2010 film True Grit.  The beautiful Teen Actress has been nominated for best supporting actress in Oscars and Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG) in 2011.

Her father, Peter Steinfeld, is a fitness trainer and her mother, Cheri, is an interior designer.  She has an older brother named Griffin (January 9, 1994), who is an off-road race driver.  Hailee is of Filipino, European-American and North African descent.  She lived in Tarzana and Agoura Hills before she moved to Thousand Oaks eight years ago.  She started acting when she was only 8 year old, after she saw a close family friend in a school play.  She left middle school toward the end of her first year to be home-schooled in sixth grade.  She attended the Ascension Lutheran and Conejo Elementary and Colina Middle School.  Her parents got her an agent and she started taking acting lessons.  She had bit parts in the TV series back to You (2007, with Kelsey Grammer) and Sons of Tucson (2010), and also appeared in a national K-Mart TV commercial.  Soon, Hailee started landing bigger and bigger roles on TV shows and movies, including a TV movie called Summer Camp Pilot for Nickelodeon and some sit-coms.  She also appeared in various short roles in movies such as “Without Wings” and “She’s a Fox”.

Still a relative unknown, in 2010 Steinfeld snagged a critical role in True Grit and beaten out a reported 15,000 other auditioners, a remake of the John Wayne classic, staring opposite Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon.  She played the character of a 14-year-old farm girl, Mattie, in search of her father’s killer.  She does this with the help of the toughest U.S. marshal she can find.  On the hunt for the murderer, they were joined by a Texan Ranger played by Matt Damon and face lots of tests along the way.  Steinfeld was rumored to have beaten out Kick Ass star Chloe Grace Moretz and Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka for the part, leaving little doubt; the young starlet could be the next big child star to take center stage in Hollywood.  True Grit was nominated for a whole whack of Oscar Awards this year.

In addition, Hailee presented at the 2011 Golden Globes with Justin Bieber.

Hailee Steinfeld Photo Gallery