Emmy Rossum’s acting career began in the theater when the seven year old was picked to join the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center as a member of the Children’s Chorus. While in the Children’s Chorus she trained in stagecraft and classical vocal technique. During the next five years, working alongside world famous opera singers such as Placido Domingo, Denyce Graves, Angela Gheorghui and Dimitri Hvorostovsky, Rossum participated in twenty different operas, and sang in five languages. In 1995, she sang in the first Metropolitan Opera production of Tschaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, directed by Elijah Moshinsky. In 1996, she sang in Franco Zefferelli’s new production of Carmen and later that year in Tim Albery’s production of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While at the Metropolitan Opera she sang in operas including La Boheme, Turandot, Pagliacci, Hansel and Gretel and Die Meistersinger von Nuremburg. In 1997 at Carnegie Hall, she joined the Metropolitan Opera Chorus and Orchestra in a presentation of Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, directed by James Levine.

At age eleven, Rossum’s television debut was as a recurring character on the American daytime soap opera As The World Turns. Subsequently, she guest starred on the award winning series Law & Order and The Practice and had the opportunity to play the teenage Audrey Hepburn in the made for TV movie Audrey.

In January of 2000, at the age of thirteen, Rossum debuted on the silver screen portraying the Appalachian orphan Deladis Slocumb in the film Songcatcher. Songcatcher won the Special Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding Ensemble Performance at the Sundance Film Festival. Rossum’s sang in a Scotch-Irish ballad style for the film. She was awarded an Independent Spirit Award in the category of “Best Debut Performance” for her role. Rossum also recorded a mother-daughter duet with Dolly Parton called “When Love is New” for the Songcatcher soundtrack.

In 2000, Variety Magazine named Rossum “One of the Ten to Watch” for that year. Rossum can also be seen in Roland Emmerich’s action film The Day After Tomorrow, starring opposite Jake Gyllenhaal and Dennis Quaid and in a supporting role opposite Sean Penn, Lawrence Fishburne, Kevin Bacon, and Tim Robbins, in the Clint Eastwood-directed drama Mystic River. For her role in Mystic River, The New York Times called her performance “transfixing” and cited it as one of the “Breakout Performances” of 2003. They named Rossum as one of the “Six Actors to Watch this Fall (and Long Thereafter).”

More recently, Rossum can be seen in the famous role of innocent chorus girl turned opera star Christine Daae in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, directed by Joel Schumacher.

Rossum was born in New York City in 1986 and attended the Spence School until 1996 when she began to homeschool through private tuition and by enrolling in programs offered by Stanford University’s Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) and Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development (CTD). Currently, she takes college courses at Columbia University.