Jennifer Lawrence Reveals She Dropped Out of School at 14 and Doesn't Have a Diploma

Jennifer Lawrence burst onto the scene at just 20 with her first Oscar nomination and win two years later. But success at such a young age meant the actress never actually finished school.

The Red Sparrow actress tells Bill Whitaker in an upcoming episode of 60 Minutes that reading a script was the first time she felt smart in her life.

“I struggled through school, I never felt very smart. And when I’m reading this script, and I feel like I know exactly what it would look like if somebody felt that way,” Lawrence, 27, recalls. “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.”

She continues, “It’s so hard to explain, it was just an overwhelming feeling of, ‘I get this. This is what I was meant to do.'”

Not wanting to let her talent go meant that Lawrence had to convince her parents to let her pursue acting at the young age of 14 — and she never looked back.

“I dropped out of middle school. I don’t technically have a GED or a diploma. I am self-educated,” she says.

But does she regret the decision? “No. I really don’t. I wanted to forge my own path. 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.”

Lawrence’s episode of 60 Minutes airs Sunday, Feb. 25 at 7 p.m. ET on CBS and Red Sparrow hits theaters March 2.