Milena Kunis

I Love Mila Kunis

Milena "Mila" Kunis (Russian: Милена Кунис; Ukrainian: Мілена Куніс born August 14, 1983;  is an actress who has starred in American films and television. Her work includes the role of Jackie Burkhart on the TV series That '70s Show and the voice of Meg Griffin on the animated series Family Guy. She has also played roles in film, such as Rachel Jansen in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Mona Sax in Max Payne, Solara in The Book of Eli and Jamie in Friends with Benefits.

In 2010, she won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress at the 67th Venice International Film Festival for her performance as Lily in Black Swan. She was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role for the same role.

Kunis was born in Chernivtsi in the Ukrainian SSR. Her mother, Elvira, is a physics teacher and drug store manager, and her father, Mark Kunis, is a mechanical engineer and cab company executive. She has an older brother, Michael. Her family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1991, when she was seven years old. Kunis is Jewish and has cited antisemitism in the former Soviet Union as one of several reasons for her family's move to the U.S She has said that her parents "raised me Jewish as much as they could", though religion was suppressed in the Soviet Union.

Kunis has stated that a lottery system allowed her family to make the move: "It took about five years. If you got chosen the first time around, you went to Moscow, where there was another lottery, and you maybe got chosen again. Then you could come to the States." On her second day in Los Angeles, she was enrolled at Rosewood Elementary School not knowing a word of English. "I blocked out second grade," she says. "I don't remember, but my mom tells me that I came home and cried every day. I wasn't that traumatized. It was just a shock." Kunis added: "I didn't understand the culture. I didn't understand the people. I didn't understand the language. My first sentence of my essay to get into college was like, 'Imagine being blind and deaf at age seven.' And that's kind of what it felt like moving to the States."

In Los Angeles, she attended Hubert Howe Bancroft Middle School. She was mostly taught by an on-set tutor for her high school years while filming That '70s Show. When not on the set, she attended Fairfax High School, where she graduated in 2001. She briefly attended UCLA and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. 

I Love Mila Kunis