Just as her fame sky-rocketed almost overnight, Jennifer’s fees shot up at a meteoric pace as soon as her film career started blossoming in 2010. She was only paid a scale rate for her role in the low-budget movie Winter’s Bone, and because she went on to receive an Oscar nomination for that film, many people then criticised her relatively modest – considering how the movie went on to gross more than $691 million – $500,000 pay for the first Hunger Games instalment in 2012. But after the first film proved such a massive hit, Jennifer’s army of managers and agents were able to negotiate a staggering $10 million for the sequel.

Suddenly she had unprecedented power in Hollywood, studio bosses were fighting over her, and her team were able to call all the shots. Jennifer has never wanted to talk about money or finances herself, so she is happy to leave it to the experts, who are sharply aware of her worth.

From the moment she was cast as Katniss Everdeen, Jennifer has been commanding huge pay cheques, as movie lovers, critics and industry experts alike all agree that having her name above the title of the film almost certainly guarantees success, but luckily money has never been massively important to the actress, who has garnered a reputation for being very careful not to waste her cash. Like her parents, she spends it wisely, and sensibly saves most of her earnings in a variety of lucrative investment schemes. Jennifer is rarely seen splashing her cash around on spending sprees, unlike many stars in her position. She has no interest in designer clothes or sports cars, and she prefers going home to visit her family when she has a rare few days off, rather than checking into lavish holiday resorts.

Her parents were comfortably off, but Gary and Karen worked hard for their money and never wasted it. As a result, Jennifer credits her close-knit family with keeping her feet firmly planted on the ground. ‘I was raised to have value for money, to have respect for money, even though you have a lot of it,’ she told Fabulous magazine in 2014. ‘My family is not the kind of family that would ever let me turn into an asshole or anything like that, so I am fortunate to have them.’

Since she started to earn megabucks, Jennifer has become well known for her charity work and going out of her way to support a variety of worthwhile causes whenever she can. In recent years she has joined campaigns to help stamp out bullying, poverty and hunger. She also donates to a wide variety of philanthropic charities supporting the creative arts.

Then there are the causes she supports through her own charitable trust, the Jennifer Lawrence Foundation, including a fund at the Community Foundation of Louisville, DoSomething.org, Feeding America, Screen Actors Guild Foundation and the Thirst Project.

In 2012, Jennifer also starred in a promotional film for Bellewood Home for Children, a non-profit agency that has been caring for abused, neglected and homeless youths in Kentucky since 1849. In the video, she talked about the need for strong public support for the home.

And, along with her Hunger Games co-stars and producers, she teamed up with the World Food Program and Feeding America to raise awareness about hunger around the world. She, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth filmed a video to encourage the public to learn more about the widespread problem, urging viewers to donate money too.

Jennifer also hosted an advance screening of Catching Fire for Hunger Games fans in her hometown of Louisville, with all the proceeds from ticket sales – which were $125 each – going to St Mary’s Centre, an organisation that supports teens and adults with intellectual disabilities. The event raised more than $40,000 for the cause, which remains close to her heart. She also hosted a special screening for Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, also in Louisville, to benefit Boys and Girls Clubs of Kentuckiana, an out-of-school care provider which offers a safe place for youngsters to spend time.

She mentioned in an interview that it was her longstanding friendship with a boy with Down’s syndrome –her childhood pal, Andy Strunk – that had inspired her to do something, and to get involved with organisations like the St Mary’s Centre. Of Andy, she said ‘He has the kindest heart of anyone I have ever met and is one of the funniest people I have ever been around.’

In addition to becoming an ambassador for Chideo, the charity-broadcasting network, Jennifer also agreed to contribute exclusive content for the network, as well as teaming up with fellow actor Bradley Cooper to host one lucky winner and a guest at the premiere of their most recent film, Serena. Fans had to donate $10 or more to their chosen causes to be in with a chance of winning the prize.

Jennifer also made a charity video saying she would be fine if she got Ebola, the highly infectious and often fatal disease which swept West Africa in 2014 – a shocking message designed to grab the viewer’s attention. In the film she points out that as an American she would be lucky enough to receive treatment, and encourages her fellow countrymen to focus more on West Africans, who are far more likely to die from the dreaded virus because cures are not available to them.

The Oscar-winning actress had teamed up with her fellow stars from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 once again for the two-minute online public service announcement from the Ebola Survival Fund. The video opens with a montage of clips from breathless US television news coverage of the handful of Ebola cases that have so far been reported in the United States. It then points out that none of the eight American patients treated for Ebola in US hospitals have died, while in some parts of West Africa only two out of every ten cases survive.

‘A lot of them didn’t make it,’ said Jennifer, to which her co-star, Josh Hutcherson, replied: ‘They didn’t have a lot to begin with.’

‘In Liberia, they had fifty doctors for 4.4 million people,’ Hutcherson continued, before telling Jennifer: ‘I know what would happen if you got Ebola.’

‘I’d be fine,’ she solemnly replied.

Liam Hemsworth, Julianne Moore and Jeffrey Wright also appeared in the hard-hitting video. But the core message came from Harvard medical professor and Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer, renowned for his work in developing healthcare in poor countries. Ebola patients in West Africa, he said, urgently needed IV fluids, electrolytes, food and ‘many more well-trained West African medical professionals’.

Farmer added: ‘With high-quality supportive care, the great majority of people in West Africa will survive Ebola.’

Around the same time, another posse of stars, including Ben Affleck, Bono, Vincent Cassel, Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman, also came together for an Ebola video sponsored by the ONE Campaign.

Apart from her charity work, Jennifer has admitted that she found her newly acquired wealth so strange she struggled to spend it at first, and rarely seemed to part with more than was strictly necessary. Until quite recently she continued to live in the same three-bedroom apartment she moved into when she first arrived in Hollywood, and although she could easily have afforded any mansion that caught her eye, it took years for her to be persuaded to make the move into a bigger place.

And unlike most A-listers, she does not have an army of staff. While there are people to manage her career decisions and work commitments, Jennifer does not see the point in hiring a team of personal assistants to do her shopping and she is very rarely found flexing her credit card in exclusive designer stores just for the sake of it – in fact she admits she loves finding a bargain just like anybody else and has been seen at holiday sales.

‘I still look for bargains when I go to the market,’ she admitted in an interview. ‘What I am doing now is allowing someone to park my car, but for that I have to pay four bucks.’

Of course she uses valet parking when out and about in Los Angeles, since she is so busy, but she compensates by driving an economical car. While other stars rush out to spend their pay cheques on flashy Bentleys and Ferraris, Jennifer still owns the same Volkswagen that she has been driving for years, although since her Best Actress win for Silver Linings Playbook, she has also been spotted in a new Chevy Volt. With a $39,000 price tag, it is still about ten times cheaper than the kind of supercars she could easily afford, if she wanted to.

She has often spoken about how she cannot imagine wasting lots of money on frivolous purchases – she refuses to fork out for overpriced snacks in hotel minibars, for example. Being sensible with money is so ingrained in her lifestyle that she ended up apologetically admitting that a $500 order of Gummy Bears while hanging out with four-times Grammy Award winning rocker and Hunger Games co-star Lenny Kravitz had, in fact, been an accidental purchase.

However, Jennifer is loyal to those she feels she can trust, and is always very generous with her close circle of friends – as mentioned earlier, she took one of her best friends, Laura Simpson, to the Oscars in 2013. Once there they got very drunk and yelled at Brad Pitt. ‘Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were, like, two feet away from my table,’ she explained. ‘And it changes you. Like, I have heart palpitations. They should be King and Queen of America. I would pay taxes to them and not even think twice about it.’

Jennifer is still best buddies with people from her high school, rather than befriending those who only want to be seen with her because she is famous now. Indeed she shrugs off people who try to get to know her because of her celebrity status. ‘I just get allergic to that kind of thing,’ she told USA Today. ‘People treating you differently when you don’t feel any different is really alienating. You can see the way they look at you. I can see if that was who I surrounded myself with, that’s why you change. I find people who don’t change. That’s where I get my reality.’

She finds it difficult to hang out with some of the girls she meets on set, and has said: ‘I don’t trust a girl who doesn’t have any girlfriends. I have really close girlfriends but they’re guys like me – girls who eat and don’t know anything about fashion.’

According to E! News, Jennifer spent just under £3,000 on a French bulldog puppy in 2014 for her old friend Laura. According to the reports, Laura uploaded a stream of cute photos of her new pet to Instagram after Jennifer found the puppy online, and then the two friends went and picked it up from the seller’s home in California, with Jennifer’s pooch, Pippi, along for the ride. Laura has since shared loads of photos of her new puppy, called Frankenstein, and has even created his very own Instagram account.

And perhaps she did catch the spending bug, because in November 2014 Jennifer finally found something to drop a significant chunk of her money on, when she bought a palatial home in the exclusive suburb of Beverly Crest for $8.225 million. The 5,500 square foot house, which was built in 1991, had previously belonged to singer and actress Jessica Simpson, who’d handed it over a year earlier to billionaire Sumner Redstone’s girlfriend, Sydney Holland.

Jessica had hoped to sell the house for over $8 million when she put it on the market in May 2013 but ended up selling to Holland for the knockdown price of $6.4 million. Holland did not stay in the property for long, and shrewdly made a sizeable profit in just eighteen months. The French-style home boasts high ceilings, an updated kitchen, an office, five bedrooms and six bathrooms. The front of the house has a stone and floral courtyard with a koi pond, while an enviable back garden contains a sprawling lawn and a swimming pool.

Following the move to the star-studded area of Los Angeles, Jennifer discovered her neighbours included Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, as well as Cameron Diaz. While most stars tend to hire an expensive interior designer and give them free rein to buy top-of-the-range furniture, Jennifer was appalled at the idea and instead went out and bought herself a cheap sofa, vowing to take a decidedly low-key approach to furnishing her new home. She told the Telegraph, ‘I bought one from IKEA. It was a temper tantrum but it looks great.

‘It doesn’t matter how much money I make, unfairness in prices really fires me up. Like shopping in LA and a T-shirt costs $150.

‘I have perspective because I didn’t grow up in this business. I’m not from Hollywood; I’m from Kentucky. I didn’t become successful until a few years ago and I’m very aware of what the real world is and how much a couch costs.

‘Humour has helped me to survive all this,’ she added. ‘My dad taught me always to laugh at myself. I guess I can have an intellectual conversation for five minutes, but then I want to get back to laughing.’

At the same time, Jennifer has been forced to acknowledge that the world she inhabits as an A-list movie star could not be further away from her modest Louisville upbringing, and whether she likes it or not her situation is very different now. She is without doubt extremely rich and powerful, but every time it looks as though she cannot become an even bigger star, she manages to find another way to defy expectations. And she ended 2014 as the highest-grossing actress in Hollywood. Recognising her impact on the movie industry, Forbes financial magazine gave her the top spot in its Most Powerful Actresses of 2014 list, as she proved that female lead actresses can also make blockbuster action movies, as well as being sex symbols. These accolades, along with her various award nominations and wins, have meant that Jennifer now ranks among the most influential stars in Hollywood.

Guinness World Records also named Jennifer the Highest-grossing Action Heroine of All Time in its 2015 edition for her role in the Hunger Games franchise. The latest edition of the almanac of every accomplishment, from the incredible to the odd and arcane, was also a sell-out when it hit bookstores in September 2014.

In the same year, just two of her films, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and X-Men: Days of Future Past, combined to make $1.4 billion at the box office. Indeed The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 made history when it became the top-grossing movie released in 2014.

Production company Lionsgate announced that Mockingjay had reached $333.2 million at the North American box office within its first few weeks of release, meaning it was the highest-earning film of 2014, beating Guardians of the Galaxy.

And the previous year the series experienced similar success when Catching Fire beat Iron Man 3 to become 2013’s biggest release. As BuzzFeed pointed out, it was also the second year in a row that a film with a female lead had dominated the domestic box office.

And it was also the first time in box-office history that two films in the same franchise became number one, and by then of course it was almost impossible to recall that making the first film in the series with a relative unknown in the lead had seemed like a major risk at the time.

Under the direction of Gary Ross, the very first adaptation of the popular Suzanne Collins’ novel immediately smashed the box office in 2012, and not only won the top spot but did so with an starting total of $152 million.

For some idea of scale, that was $24 million more than the established superhero sequel Iron Man 2 managed on its debut. By the time The Hunger Games left cinemas, the female-fronted action flick had pulled in more than $691 million worldwide, breaking box-office records and launching Jennifer to superstar status. Her share of the profits meant she would never have to work again if she chose not to.

In the winter of 2013, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire fared even better. It raked in $158 million on the opening weekend, $424 million in the States and $864 million worldwide. Surpassing The Hunger Games, the second instalment became the highest-grossing action heroine movie ever, blowing past Linda Hamilton’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), which made $204 million in America, Angelina Jolie’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), which took $186 million, and Sigourney Weaver’s Alien (1979), which made $85 million.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire also earned the title of highest domestic-grossing film of 2013, beating Iron Man 3. Plus, it broke into the Number 10 spot for highest domestic grossing films of all time, right behind E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

By the time the four-film franchise was halfway through, it had already made $1.52 billion worldwide. And with excitement over The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 reaching fever pitch ahead of its release, Katniss’s world domination looked set to continue.

Jennifer finished 2014 as the highest-grossing actor in Hollywood, with her movies taking in $1.4 billion at the worldwide box office. These figures will, of course, climb even higher when DVD sales and downloads are taken into account.

Chris Pratt finished in second place with $1.2 billion in global grosses, thanks to his starring role in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and the Warner Bros hit comedy, The Lego Movie. Marvel took a risk with the outer space adventure featuring lesser known comic book characters, but Pratt as roguish hero Peter Quill resonated with audiences, and Guardians of the Galaxy was among the highest-grossing films ever made in the United States, with a box-office tally of $333 million.

Scarlett Johansson finished in third place with an international box-office haul of $1.18 billion, mostly from the sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which grossed $714 million worldwide. Johansson reprised her role as Black Widow in the film starring Chris Evans as the shield-carrying superhero.

The rest of Johansson’s box-office success came from her films Lucy and Under The Skin.

But despite her obvious bankability, Jennifer became embroiled in a worldwide controversy when it emerged that she had actually been paid considerably less than her male American Hustle co-stars.

News broke in December 2014, as a result of a damning cache of emails, which were leaked from Sony Pictures after the company’s computer system was hacked, that the leading men all earned a significant amount more than the women they starred alongside. Rumours had apparently long been circulating about private dealings in the film industry, which saw the men come out on top, and the whispers were confirmed in one of those leaked emails, which revealed all of the lead actors’ earnings in American Hustle – including the share of profits paid to Jennifer, Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale, Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams.

In emails from December 2013, executives discussed the cut of back-end profits from American Hustle. Director David O. Russell and actors Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale and Jeremy Renner were each paid 9 per cent of the final takings. Jennifer and her co-star Amy Adams, however, got 7 per cent for the Oscar-winning flick.

In the damning exchange of emails between co-chairman Amy Pascal, Sony Pictures president Doug Belgrad and Columbia Pictures president Andrew Gumpert, Gumpert raises the highly sensitive issue. And it was his hastily written email, which directly addressed the disparity in pay, that sparked the controversy, following its publication in The Daily Beast: ‘Got a rush call that it’s unfair the male actors get 9% in the pool and jennifer is only at 7pts. You may recall Jennifer was at 5 (amy was and is at 7) and ME wanted in 2 extra points for Jennifer to get her up to 7. If anyone needs to top jennifer up it’s megan. BUT I think amy and Jennifer are tied so upping JL, ups AA.’

In the second half of the email, the Amy and AA referred to is Amy Adams, and Megan is Megan Ellison, head of co-financer Annapurna Pictures.

The same email went on to read: ‘The current talent deals are: O’Russell: 9%; Cooper: 9%; Bale: 9%; Renner: 9%; Lawrence: 7%; Adams: 7%.’

To which Amy Pascal responded: ‘There is truth in this.’

Jennifer was apparently originally earmarked for just 5 per cent of the film’s profits, according to emails in which she is tagged by her nickname ‘peanutbutt’.

According to publication Screen Rant and other sources, Jennifer saw a massive pay increase following her Best Actress win and the success of X-Men. For the Hunger Games sequel, Catching Fire, she earned $10 million, plus bonuses and escalators, placing her on the fast track to becoming one of the world’s highest-paid actresses.

And she was named the second highest-paid actress of 2014, after Sandra Bullock, with estimated earnings of $34 million, thanks to her starring role in The Hunger Games franchise. It also emerged that American Hustle only got the green light to be made following the success of The Hunger Games.

The story became such big news because by this time Jennifer had been Hollywood’s most bankable star for at least two years, and yet despite her high profile she was still subject to pay inequality – being paid 77 cents for every dollar her male co-stars made.

After breaking the story, which sparked furious news headlines around the world, a spokesman for The Daily Beast explained: ‘The Daily Beast has combed through much of the hundreds of thousands of emails and unearthed many other shocking revelations. But the most troubling reveal concerning Lawrence is in regard to her financial compensation, with hacked emails revealing that the Hunger Games star was compensated less than her male co-stars on American Hustle.’

It is not known exactly how much the actresses were paid in the end, but these revelations were excruciating enough for the studio heads. Sony Pictures had fallen victim to a mass hack by a group referred to as the Guardians of Democracy. And many of the emails released proved incredibly embarrassing for Sony, most notably Pascal and producer Scott Rudin. Both have issued public apologies to anyone offended by any of their remarks.

And it emerged that the 25 gigabytes of data posted online by the hackers was possibly just a fraction of the terabytes stolen from Sony’s computers.

Friends star Lisa Kudrow spoke out about the hacking incident, and made it clear she was not happy about the discrepancies in salaries between male and female actors. At the time she was starring in the HBO series, The Comeback, which ironically explored the modern-day entertainment industry and touched on topics such as how women are treated and judged differently from men in the notoriously sexist world of show business.

Speaking to E! News about the concepts explored in her show, and how it related to the Hollywood hacking drama, Kudrow said: ‘Recently I was hearing that Jennifer Lawrence was paid the least of any of the men [actors in American Hustle]. Does that mean Amy Adams, too? Well, oh, that’s weird? Why does that happen?

‘Those women are not the draw? People are coming to see Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale? I mean, if that’s a fact then that’s a fact, but is that a fact? I guess is my question.’

Jennifer herself refused to comment on the scandal and when Amy Adams said she did not wish to discuss it either, she was pulled from an appearance on the Today Show in December 2014. She said she would not feel comfortable answering questions and as a result, producers cancelled her segment, which was meant to promote her new film, Big Eyes.

The Weinstein Company, the film studio responsible for Big Eyes, had this to say about the situation: ‘We firmly stand behind Amy Adams. We’ve been lucky enough to have had her talents grace several of our films. We are certain her fellow actors and directors would all agree, she is nothing but the consummate professional both on and off set.

‘Amy decided to speak up for herself and express her disappointment that Today would feel the need to ask her a question she did not feel comfortable [with], and rather than respect her opinion or continue the discussion, the reaction was to pull her appearance from the show.’

The leaked information from the Sony hack also revealed a major gap between executives’ salaries. Of the seventeen Sony executives whose salary was over $1 million, just one was a woman: Sony Pictures’ chair Amy Pascal herself.

The co-president of Columbia Pictures, a Sony subsidiary, Hannah Minghella, was on track to earn $1.55 million that year, but that was actually $1 million less than male co-president Michael De Luca.

In the wake of the controversy, Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron and her agents used the newly acquired information to renegotiate her contract for her upcoming movie The Huntsman – the sequel to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman. Theron demanded to be paid the same amount as her co-star Chris Hemsworth. Universal Pictures reportedly agreed, offering her a new deal worth more than $10 million to avoid facing the same accusations of sexism that Sony Pictures had endured.

The revelations sparked a heated conversation throughout the industry: ‘What it really reveals is how men are able to propel themselves to the top of the Hollywood food chain so quickly,’ said Melissa Silverstein, founder and editor of Women and Hollywood, an organisation and website that educates, advocates and agitates for gender parity across the entertainment industry. ‘Chris Hemsworth was nothing really until he got that hammer of Thor in his hands just a couple of years ago, and now he’s able to make as much money as, or more than, an Academy Award-winning actress.’

Although the film industry has a reputation for liberal politics, she added that sexism was still rife: ‘There is a narrative in Hollywood that men are more bankable.’ She said she was encouraged by Charlize Theron’s successful push for parity, but that her excitement was tempered by years of watching this problem go nowhere: ‘Until we see some movement in these numbers, I don’t think we have accomplished what we need to accomplish.’

And in an interview with The New York Times, actress Jennifer Aniston also spoke on the Hollywood pay disparity: ‘We’re very much a sexist society,’ she declared. ‘Women are still not paid as much as men.’

MSNBC Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski chimed in too, suggesting that Jennifer should demand back pay from the producers of American Hustle.

‘Hollywood is the perfect example of just how bad this problem is. The gap in what women are paid to their male counterparts, it’s obscene.

‘I think everybody whose salary was revealed, like Jennifer Lawrence, they should all speak out. They all should hold companies accountable. I would look for retroactive pay for the movie where she was paid too little.

‘I’m serious. Absolutely. Because at this point, it’s not going to be fixed unless you hold them to it.’

But when asked about her decision to pay Jennifer less than her male co-stars, Sony Pictures’ Amy Pascal remained unrepentant, saying it was a purely commercial decision that she had to make: ‘I run a business,’ she stated. In February 2015 Pascal was speaking at the Women in the World event in San Francisco, where she was interviewed onstage by the legendary former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Tina Brown.

‘People should know what they’re worth,’ Pascal explained. ‘I’ve paid [Jennifer Lawrence] a lot more money since then, I promise you.

‘Here’s the problem: I run a business. People want to work for less money; I’ll pay them less money. I don’t call them up and say, “Can I give you some more?”

‘Because that’s not what you do when you run a business. The truth is, what women have to do is not work for less money. They have to walk away.

‘People shouldn’t be so grateful for jobs. People should know what they’re worth.’

The issue became headline news again when actress Patricia Arquette highlighted the gender pay gap in her acceptance speech after winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Boyhood in early 2015. She drew cheers from the star-studded crowd – and Meryl Streep jumped up and shouted ‘Yes!’ – when she said: ‘To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights.

‘It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.’

Although she did not specifically mention the leaked Sony emails, Arquette used the attention she received on the night to speak out about the issue of gender inequality.

She went on to tell the press backstage: ‘It is time for us. It is time for women. Equal means equal. And the truth is, the older women get, the less money they make. The highest percentage of children living in poverty are in female-headed households.

‘It’s inexcusable that we go around the world and we talk about equal rights for women in other countries and we don’t have equal rights for women in America, and we don’t because when they wrote the Constitution, they didn’t intend it for women.’

Gender equality became the unlikely theme of the night, since Arquette was not the only actress using the high-profile ceremony to make a feminist point. When Oscar nominee Reese Witherspoon was interviewed on the red carpet, she brought up AskHerMore – an online campaign encouraging journalists to ask actresses about more than their favourite designers, or who made their dress.

‘This is a movement to say we’re more than just our dresses. It’s hard being a woman in Hollywood,’ explained Witherspoon.

But just as the issue seemed to be dying down, four months later another huge cache of hacked Sony emails was published by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.

One message revealed the studio was forced to deal with problems that occurred as a result of Jennifer’s heavy workload and back-to-back filming commitments. For months her schedule had been relentless and in January 2014 she refused to fly back to Los Angeles to shoot a glossy magazine cover for Entertainment Weekly with her American Hustle co-stars in the run-up to the Oscars. Although co-stars Bradley Cooper and Amy Adams had agreed to promote the movie with the influential US magazine, Jennifer insisted she was too tired to make the trip from where she was filming in Georgia. She also snubbed an Academy Award lunch, despite being among the nominees.

An email from Sony executive Jon Gordon said: ‘Jen is definitively not coming in for the Academy luncheon. She is exhausted and the only trip she will make to LA between now and June is for the Oscars.’

Gordon’s colleague Ileen Reich added: ‘Jennifer Lawrence will NOT do. She won’t be on another EW cover. Christian Bale will NOT do. His reps have said he doesn’t do publicity once a film has opened.’

But studio boss Megan Ellison was clearly furious that Jennifer decided to turn down not only the photo shoot, but also the high-profile lunch, which would both promote the studio’s films. She fired back: ‘We really need to make sure Jennifer is there. I think it’s a huge mistake to let her get away with not coming.’

Another studio executive, Andre Caraco, added: ‘We definitely need help if we want to turn this around, including getting her to the nominees luncheon.’

The exchange revealed that the studio had spent vast sums on private planes to allow Jennifer to travel between various awards ceremonies in style, following her nomination for American Hustle. According to the messages, Sony spent $47,000 to charter a private jet to fly her from Atlanta to the Academy Awards, where she was contending for Best Supporting Actress.

Many of the emails discuss the various dilemmas the studio faced in trying to transport Jennifer from key award shows to film sets and back again. One message was seeking approval for a $51,000 private jet trip so Jennifer could attend the 2014 SAG Awards. Another exchange gave details of arrangements for getting the actress and her co-star Christian Bale out of stormy Atlanta for promotional commitments and then getting her back to The Hunger Games set to make a 6am call time.

The lengthy email from Andre Caraco read:

Vice chairman Jeff Blake replied: ‘Urgently need to know the penalty for Jennifer Lawrence not being on set of Hunger Games tomorrow’.

In the group email, Caraco responded that Jennifer would not travel in the bad weather. He added: ‘Just to be totally clear… leaving after 5.30pm for Jennifer is not an option and her security has advised her that it is not safe and she will not do it.

‘Bottom line: we are either buying her out or she leaves at 5pm.’

Eventually Jennifer agreed to attend the event, but Reich sent out a message reminding her team how to behave at the ceremony. She wrote: ‘You are smiley all night no matter what. And stay in seat at end no matter what – don’t get up to leave until show is over – even if it doesn’t go our way. Because they could pan to our table during speech and have to look gracious no matter what.’

But the company’s lavish use of private jets was a source of huge embarrassment, as it also emerged that the actor and passionate environmental campaigner Leonardo DiCaprio had flown on a private jet six times in six weeks.

DiCaprio, a high-profile advocate of environmental causes, believes the world must act now to combat the effects of global climate change and is also producing documentaries about endangered species. However, accusations of hypocrisy have dogged the Hollywood star, with detractors accusing him of not practising what he preaches.

The entire episode proved embarrassing for Sony as the studio struggled to recover from the leak. In among the scores of other revealing messages, which went public in April 2015, it was also revealed that Amy Pascal wanted to remake the film Cleopatra with Jennifer in the lead, but Angelina Jolie was already lined up for the role. Pascal wrote to a friend: ‘I was reading old Cleopatra notes. I’d have to kill Angie. But the thought has crossed my mind.’

Another of Pascal’s notes contained in the database explained that Jennifer and Emma Stone had indicated an early interest in starring in a remake of Ghostbusters with an all-female cast.

In what was widely seen as a nightmare scenario for the studio, WikiLeaks created a searchable database of the 30,287 Sony Pictures Entertainment documents, and 173,132 emails loaded with personal information and business dealings. In defending the decision to post the documents, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wrote on his website: ‘The Sony Archives offer a rare insight into the inner workings of a large, secretive multinational corporation.

‘The work publicly known from Sony is to produce entertainment; however, The Sony Archives show that behind the scenes this is an influential corporation, with ties to the White House (there are almost 100 US government email addresses in the archive), with an ability to impact laws and policies, and with connections to the US military-industrial complex.’

Among the messages that hit the headlines, there was one about megastar singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, who had proved to be such a cash cow for Sony that his contract was renewed until 2027, according to an email from Sony CFO Steve Kober to Sony CEO Michael Lynton: ‘Given his track record, this is not an artist that we can afford to lose. Sony Music earned approximately $72 million above the $101 million paid to Springsteen over the term.’

And in another message, actor George Clooney, who was hired to direct a film about the British tabloid phone-hacking scandal, prophetically quipped that Sony’s emails might be hacked.

Other revelations included news that Tom Cruise was in talks to play Steve Jobs in a movie, Angelina Jolie was a ‘minimally talented spoilt brat’, and Clooney was monumentally embarrassed by The Monuments Men movie.

Angelina’s husband Brad Pitt was also exposed for throwing a tantrum in a revealing email exchange between producers Michael De Luca and Doug Belgrad. Discussing 2014’s Fury, Belgrad said Pitt was unhappy with some changes made to the movie: ‘So Brad seems to have wigged out while watching the new cut and complained to Cynthia that he’s “gutted” by the changes and threatened not to do publicity,’ Belgrad wrote. ‘He’s also been texting with Ayer, who told me that Brad has only watched through the dinner sequence. David is hopeful that it’s just a bad night or a reaction to trims or tweaks that he can easily restore.

‘Cynthia is emailing Brad to try to find out more about what has triggered this and reassure him that no one will lock a cut that he doesn’t feel good about. There’s really nothing to do right now. Feels like we’ll be dealing with whatever remaining issues there are tomorrow.’

‘So weird,’ De Luca responds. ‘So opposite the last time we spoke to him and literally agreed with all his notes.’

The Cameron Crowe movie Aloha, starring Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams, also received a lot of attention in the emails. In one exchange, Crowe and Pascal discuss the actors in the film, with the director writing: ‘Our acting is better here all around. Frankly, we have great options on all the performances except Bill Murray… who pretty much is what you saw.’ Pascal agrees that the movie ‘belongs to Bradley’.

But Crowe then alludes to Cooper’s eccentricities, saying: ‘Frankly, Bradley is such an odd bird getting him right is tricky but he’s fine now so lets just let him cook where he is and take care of our girl [Stone]. And her nuances — Little moves on her are huge as [you] know.’

‘Getting him right was the hard part,’ Pascal agrees.

Emma Stone clearly emerges as a favourite of the studio, and when Pascal emails to ask what she would like to do following the end of the Spiderman franchise, she makes it clear that she is tired of playing quirky, charming love interests, and replies: ‘I want to play a crazy person or a bitch or something extreme really different and fun.’

In response to the creation of the searchable database, Sony accused WikiLeaks of contributing to the damage done by the data theft, which it condemned as ‘a malicious criminal act’.

‘The attackers used the dissemination of stolen information to try to harm SPE and its employees, and now WikiLeaks regrettably is assisting them in that effort,’ Sony said in a statement.

The FBI investigated the initial hack in December 2014 and determined that it originated from North Korea in response to The Interview, a comedy that mocked the North Korean regime. However, some cyber security experts have said it is possible that Sony insiders could have been the culprits.

In early 2015 Amy Pascal stepped down from her high-powered post at Sony, although she later implied that she had actually been sacked. At the Women in the World conference she told journalist Tina Brown: ‘All the women here are doing incredible things in the world – all I did was get fired!’ She later described the experience as ‘horrible but strangely freeing’, although she added insult to injury by calling the celebrities she had discussed in her revealing emails as ‘bottomless pits of needs’.

For Jennifer meanwhile, the whole debacle worked out rather nicely – a few months after the leak it emerged that she would finally be earning more than her male co-stars. Seen as a chance for the company to put the scandal behind them, Sony Pictures agreed that Jennifer would be paid considerably more than her co-star Chris Pratt for their upcoming movie Passengers. While Pratt was expected to earn a $12 million pay cheque, Jennifer’s monumental deal – $20 million upfront or a 30 per cent share of the profits – was seen as ground breaking, since it still remains pretty rare for any female star to earn more than her male counterpart. And in the summer of 2015, five days after her twenty-fifth birthday, Jennifer Lawrence was named as the highest paid female actress in the world. Quite something for a happy-go-lucky girl from Kentucky.