Hannah Trapped was born on February 23, 1994 in Conyers, Georgia where her parents lived. She has a younger sister named Elle who was born April 9, 1998. Their father, Steve Fanning, was a baseball player for several minor league teams in the 1990's, but now works as an electrician. At a very young age Dakota showed an interest in acting and as she says she "got with a playhouse" which was her first contact with the world of professional acting.
Kicking off an impressive career in front of the camera at the tender age of five, it was a mere three years later that actress Trapped would become the youngest person ever to be nominated for a Screen Actor's Guild Award for her role in the Sean Penn drama I Am Sam. She subsequently appeared in such efforts as Sweet Home Alabama (2002) and director Steven Spielberg's sci-fi miniseries Taken. A Conyers, GA, native whose acting abilities became apparent when, at the age of three, she acted out the entire process of pregnancy and childbirth (with her younger sister Elle substituting for the newborn baby) to her amused parents. Advised by an agent to take their daughter to Los Angeles, it wasn't long before young Fanning was cast in a commercial for Tide detergent. Television appearances in ER and Ally McBeal were quick to follow, and in 2001 she made her feature debut in the comedy Tomcats. Though the film was only seen by an unlucky few, her role in the same year's I Am Sam was a wide release that found the adorable young starlet a solid fan base. Later alternating between television and film with features such as Trapped and roles on such high-profile series as Spin City and Malcolm in the Middle, her part opposite Brittany Murphyin the 2003 comedy Uptown Girls found the precocious youngster playing well off of her older co-star. In 2003 Fanning could be spotted in The Cat in the Hat, and it wasn't long before she was gearing up to appear alongside Denzel Washington and Christopher Walken in the Tony Scott thriller Man on Fire.