Kristen Jaymes Stewart (born April 9, 1990) is an American actress. She is best known for playing Bella Swan in Twilight and New Moon, and will reprise her role in Eclipse. She has also starred in films such as Panic Room, Zathura, In the Land of Women, Adventureland, The Messengers and as rock star Joan Jett in The Runaways.
Kristen Stewart was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Her father, John Stewart, is a stage manager and television producer who has worked for Fox. Her mother, Jules Mann-Stewart, is a script supervisor originally from Maroochydore, Queensland, Australia. She has an older brother, Cameron Stewart. Stewart attended school until the seventh grade, and then continued her education by correspondence. She has since completed high school.
Twilight is a 2008 romantic-fantasy film. It is the first film in The Twilight Saga film series, directed by Catherine Hardwicke and based on the novel of the same name by Stephenie Meyer. It focuses on the development of a relationship between human teenager Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), and the subsequent efforts of Cullen and his family to keep Swan safe from a coven of evil vampires.
The project was in development for approximately three years at Paramount Pictures, during which time a screen adaptation which differed significantly from the novel was written. Summit Entertainment acquired the rights to the novel after three years of the project's stagnant development. Melissa Rosenberg wrote a new adaptation of the novel shortly before the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike and sought to be faithful to the novel's storyline. Principal photography took 44 days, and completed on May 2, 2008.[5] The film was primarily shot in Washington and Oregon in early 2008.
Twilight was released in theaters on November 21, 2008, and grossed US$35.7 million on its opening day. The film has grossed US$408,773,703 in worldwide box office and, as of February 2010, $186,347,713 in North American DVD sales. It is also the film with the most DVDs sold in 2009, selling a total of 10,233,407 units that year.The soundtrack was released on November 4, 2008. New Moon and Eclipse, the next two books in the series, were produced as films the following year.