Zoe Saldana

Zoe Yadira Saldana-Perego, born June 19, 1978, in Passaic, New Jersey, to a Dominican father and a Puerto Rican mother, and raised partly in the Dominican Republic, is the actress who appears in the three highest-grossing films in cinema history — Avatar (2009), Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) — a feat of commercial ubiquity in blockbuster franchise cinema that no other actress has approached. Growing up between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic, she trained in classical and modern dance from an early age at the FACES theater arts program in New York. Her film career began with Center Stage (2000), a dance drama that showcased her physicality, and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), before her career-defining double franchise casting: as Uhura in J.J. Abrams's rebooted Star Trek trilogy (2009–2016) and as Neytiri in James Cameron's Avatar (2009), the latter requiring her to spend months in performance capture technology while learning the Na'vi language that Cameron had created with linguists. She subsequently took on the role of Gamora in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Guardians of the Galaxy franchise (2014-2023), adding a third major franchise to her portfolio. Her additional work includes Colombiana (2011), which she also produced, Drumline: A New Beat (2014), Drumline (2015), and multiple independent dramas and comedies that demonstrate a range beyond her franchise work. She has been an outspoken advocate for Latino representation in Hollywood, pointing out that the three highest-grossing films of all time were all anchored by a Latino woman — herself — and yet she has rarely been discussed as a leading actress in the same terms as her white counterparts.