Jennifer Lawrence Reveals She Never Graduated from High School

The award-winning actress dropped out of school when she was only 14 years old.

“I struggled through school, I never felt very smart,” Lawrence told Bill Whitaker during an interview on 60 Minutes. It wasn’t until she read a script for the first time when she began to finally feel intelligent. She went on to say, “I’m reading this script, and I feel like I know exactly what it would look like if somebody felt that way. 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.”

Lawrence convinced her parents to let her drop out of middle school and pursue acting full-time. “I don’t technically have a GED or a diploma. I am self-educated,” she tells Whitaker.

Looking back, she doesn’t regret her decision. “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,” she says.