How Emma Stone plotted her path to Hollywood to combat her crippling anxiety attacks: An inspiring story with uncanny echoes of her feel-good smash hit La La Land 

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One evening after school when she was 14, Emily Jean Stone, as she was then called, invited her parents up to her room to watch a PowerPoint presentation she had put together on her computer.

Assuming it was some sort of homework assignment, mum and dad dutifully traipsed up to their daughter’s bedroom.

But the subject of the presentation was not the American Civil War or geological formations of the Grand Canyon, but a topic of far greater interest to the young teen: how to become a movie star.

Entitled ‘Project Hollywood 2004’, it was a step-by-step guide on how and why the young Emily was destined to become a star.

Rather astonishingly, instead of telling their daughter to shut up and get on with her homework, her parents followed her instructions to the letter.

Having just won her first Golden Globe for her role in La La Land, Emma Stone, 28, is now nominated for a Bafta and a Screen Actors Guild Award

Not long afterwards, mother and daughter moved away from the family home in Arizona to Hollywood and set about following the blueprint outlined in the presentation.

And as the world goes crazy for Emma Stone — the stage name Emily later adopted — and her latest movie, La La Land, in which she stars, appropriately, as a young actress trying to make it in Hollywood, there is little need to point out that Emma’s plan for stardom worked a treat.

Dressed from top to toe in a slinky wine-coloured dress, with matching lipstick and nail polish perfectly complementing her trademark red hair (Emma is actually a natural blonde) she looked every inch the movie star as she posed for the cameras with co-star Ryan Gosling at the London premiere on Thursday night. 

Little wonder. Having just won her first Golden Globe, Emma, 28, is now nominated for a Bafta and a Screen Actors Guild Award. One doesn’t need a crystal ball to predict that she will also be in the running for the hotly contested best actress award at the Oscars next month.

Who knows, perhaps a coveted statuette was included on the ‘to do’ list of her teenage presentation? One thing is certain, Emma Stone is one of the most single-minded stars of her generation.

In an interview in 2015 with the New York Times, in which she spoke about the presentation that eventually led to Hollywood fame, she said: ‘I make them because when I feel strongly about something, I cry. When I feel really passionate, I get overwhelmed, and it makes me cry. I learned early on to be more logical and make presentations.

Emma Stone shows off the star quality when she was learning her craft at the Valley Youth Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona

‘I asked to be home-schooled in a different presentation when I was 12. That was on a clipboard. I’m not kidding.’

She did not explain in the interview why she wanted to be educated at home, but her unusual wish is almost certainly connected to the terrifying anxiety and panic attacks she suffered as a child — and to which she is still prone.

‘My brain is naturally zooming 30 steps ahead to the worst-case scenario,’ she explained to Rolling Stone magazine. ‘When I was about seven, I was convinced the house was burning down. I could sense it. Not a hallucination, just a tightening in my chest, the feeling I couldn’t breathe, like the world was going to end.

‘There were some flare-ups, but my anxiety was constant. I would ask my mom a hundred times how the day was gonna lay out.

‘What time was she gonna drop me off? Where was she gonna be? What would happen at lunch? Feeling nauseous. At a certain point, I couldn’t go to friends’ houses any more — I could barely get out the door to school.’

Her parents arranged for her to see a therapist, which helped. But crucially, she discovered that performing was an outlet that helped to calm her mind.

‘I started acting at this youth theatre, doing improvisation and sketch comedy,’ she said. ‘You have to be present in improvisation, and that’s the antithesis of anxiety.’

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in award-winning Hollywood musical La La Land

So, it seems, Emma is not the classic Hollywood brat, but simply someone who found that acting was a way to deal with crippling anxiety.

Indeed, those who have met her say Emma is down-to-earth, funny and kind. Fellow A-lister Jennifer Lawrence, whom Emma now counts as a friend, described her as ‘sweet’ after an incident when Emma tended to the Hunger Games star who had become ill after drinking too much at an Adele concert.

‘She just started rubbing my back,’ says Lawrence. ‘She was so sweet.’

Friends say Emma is also endearingly aware of just how stupendously lucky she is.

T he girl with the world at her feet was born and raised with her younger brother, Spencer, in Scottsdale, Arizona, by their parents, Krista, a housewife and dad, Jeff, a contractor.

She suffered from colic as a baby, which led to her developing those distinctly throaty tones which set her apart from other actresses.

‘My parents always made me feel as though I could do anything,’ she said once. ‘Not in a cheerleading “You’re the greatest!” kind of way. It was more: “You’re going to have to work hard, but we’ll support you however we can.”’

Emma has Swedish ancestry through her paternal grandfather, Conrad Ostberg Sten — the family’s surname was changed to Stone — and was raised in the Lutheran religion.

Emma as Olive in the 2010 teen comedy Easy A. Her role was described as 'one of the Top 10 Movie Performances of 2010'

As a result, she is fastidious about order and structure, and to this day neatly lays out the clothes she is going to wear, the night before.

Although in many ways she was just a normal girl growing up — she was a fan of the Spice Girls — in the background there was always a level of anxiety from which she was to find her only escape was through acting.

She became a member of the Valley Youth Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona, playing a variety of roles including Eeyore in a production of A.A. Milne’s Winnie The Pooh and a wicked stepsister in Cinderella.

Emma’s former drama teacher, Bob Cooper, remembers the ‘cute little blonde girl with the raspy voice’. He recalls: ‘She just had a special ability that made me know.

‘There’s acting, and then there’s being. She just always had an innate ability to make a character come to life, and you see the truth in the character and the story-telling.’

Krista, for one, believed in her daughter’s natural talent. So in January 2004, she took the decision to move with Emma to Los Angeles, set themselves up in cheap accommodation and begin the daunting task of making showbusiness contacts and joining the audition merry-go-round alongside hundreds of other ambitious starlets.

Another pre-fame picture of Emma taken when she was at the Valley Youth Theatre

At the outset, there were the inevitable disappointments and rejections, but Emma and her mum persevered with ‘Project Hollywood’.

She endured so many humiliating auditions — including crying as part of a monologue only to be interrupted by a director taking a phone call about lunch — that some of them were even incorporated into the La La Land script.

A breakthrough of sorts came in 2005 in a pilot for The New Partridge Family — a take on the 1970s sitcom — with Emma playing the part of Laurie Partridge, originally played by Susan Dey.

The series was not picked up by broadcasters, however, and it was to be another two years on the audition circuit before Emma won her first film role, in the teen comedy Superbad.

Superbad led to more comedies including Paper Man with Kieran Culkin (whom she is said to have dated for a while), Crazy, Stupid, Love with Ryan Gosling, Zombieland and Easy A.

Emma wanted to be an actress from a very young age and we went to all of her shows at the local youth theatre

She was now firmly established as a comedy actress, but what should have been a time of joy for Emma and her mother became one of anxiety when around this time Krista was diagnosed with breast cancer.

A long haul of treatment ensued. Happily she recovered. Mother and daughter celebrated by getting tattoos of birds feet.

Emma made a further leap towards the big league in 2012 when she took the starring role in The Amazing Spider-Man opposite British actor Andrew Garfield. Off‑screen, a romance developed. The pair were said to have set up home together in Manhattan, and also to have bought a bungalow in Beverly Hills.

But theirs has been an on/off relationship. Although the pair were spotted together in London last summer, their current status is unclear.

H owever Garfield, 33, was in the audience at the Golden Globes in LA on Sunday night and leapt to his feet, clapping wildly when it was announced that Emma had taken the award for best actress in a musical or comedy.

But in her acceptance speech it was not Garfield she was thinking of but the mother who took that leap of faith and set off to Hollywood with her daughter in search of a dream. ‘I have to start by thanking my amazing mom,’ she told the audience. Emma is relishing her moment in the sun, travelling the world promoting her new movie, and hanging out with singer Taylor Swift and Jennifer Lawrence when she’s back in LA.

Emma looked every inch the movie star as she posed for the cameras at the London premiere of La La Land on Thursday night

Her co-stars all seem to adore her. Jonah Hill, who starred with her in Superbad, says: ‘Her part required someone who was completely beautiful and charming but didn’t look down on anybody else,’ he recalled later, ‘and that’s Emma — she never makes anyone feel less than.’

Ryan Gosling, who has starred with her in three films, said recently: ‘Emma Stone is just like constantly opening Christmas presents. There’s nobody like her.’

Emma’s 85-year-old grandmother Marilyn Stone agrees. She told the Daily Mail: ‘She is very warm and caring and loving to us. We are blessed to have her.

‘Emma wanted to be an actress from a very young age and we went to all of her shows at the local youth theatre. She was always good and, of course, we are so proud of her.’

And with a fortune estimated to be $8million — a figure that will surely rise dramatically — the future looks increasingly golden for the girl who only started acting to escape her demons.

Although nobody could accuse Emma of leaving anything to chance in her quest to become a star, there was, curiously, an element of fate about the role that has made her the talk of Hollywood. For the part of Mia was originally taken by another, Emma — Emma Watson, of Harry Potter fame, who had to pull out owing to other filming commitments. It was only then that Emma Stone took her place.

There are some things in life that even a PowerPoint presentation can’t account for.