Tallest Female Celebrities

The tallest women in entertainment

Most of the women on this list stand close to or above 6 feet, well beyond the national average for women in every country this site covers. The ranking covers thirty famous women in film, television, music and modeling with a recorded height, from Gwendoline Christie at 191 cm (6′3″) down to Laura Dern and Margaret Qualley at 179 cm (5′10½″). Taken together they average about 181.8 cm (5′11½″).

For comparison, American women born in 1996 average about 163.5 cm (5′4½″) in the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration data shown on our United States average height page. Even the women at the bottom of this list are around 15 cm taller than that, and Christie is about 27 cm taller.

A long tie at 180 cm follows, including Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid, Melania Trump, Gisele Bündchen, Claudia Schiffer, Karen Gillan, Laverne Cox and Rebecca Romijn. If you want to see what that height looks like in feet and inches, the 180 cm conversion page breaks it down.

Gwendoline Christie: 6′3″ and a role written for her height

Gwendoline Christie tops the list at 191 cm. In her Vogue interview she gives her height as 6′3″, which is 190.5 cm, and La Vanguardia reported it as 1.90 meters, so every source agrees to within a centimeter.

Her height shaped both the obstacles and the breakthrough in her career. According to her Wikipedia biography, she was told at drama school that she would probably never work because she did not look like most actors, and her agent responded "well, good luck with that" when she said she wanted screen roles. In 2002 her height drew the attention of the photographer Polly Borland, who made her the subject of a series called Bunny that ran until 2008.

The role that made her famous was Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones, a character described in the novels as unusually tall and muscular. Wikipedia notes that fans had proposed Christie for the part long before auditions. She told Vogue she had not read a character before who explored "the inner life of a very tall woman," and that she drew on her own experience of being bullied for her height. She also described a practical problem on set: her co-star Rory McCann is 6′7″, and the two had to act as though they were physical equals. La Vanguardia adds that she went on to play Captain Phasma in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Elizabeth Debicki: dancers' daughter at 1.88 m

Elizabeth Debicki is recorded at 188 cm (6′2″), matching the 1.88 m reported by La Vanguardia in a 2018 profile written during the promotion of Steve McQueen's Widows. Born in Paris and raised in Australia from the age of five, she told the paper that apart from her teenage years, when she felt like an alien (the paper's Spanish has "como una extraterrestre"), she had always been comfortable with her height, largely because her parents, both professional dancers, are as tall as she is and taught her to carry it with pride.

She also recounted a moment on the Widows set. Filming a kiss with Lukas Haas, she kept stooping to his level until McQueen, unhappy with the shot after several camera moves, asked her to stand up straight. Baz Luhrmann, who cast her in The Great Gatsby, had likewise told her not to hide her height. Wikipedia notes that costume designers deliberately used her height in films including The Great Gatsby and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Janet McTeer: "McTall"

The New Yorker's 2016 profile of Janet McTeer describes her as "a lithe six feet one," which is 185.4 cm and matches the 185 cm on this site. Her nickname, the magazine reports, is McTall. The profile describes a rapid adolescent growth spurt: the year she was fourteen she grew seven inches. Being half an inch taller than a boy she liked left her in tears, but she told the magazine that afterwards she "stood up tall" and never slouched again, and that at college she came to see her height as a tool. At RADA she won the Bancroft Gold Medal for best actress. Her first drama-school audition, in five-and-a-half-inch heels as Juliet, went badly; she later switched to roles such as Goneril that suited her presence.

Actresses at 6 feet

Four women share 183 cm (6′0″) on this list, and La Vanguardia's 2018 article grouped several of them among Hollywood's tallest.

• Allison Janney originally wanted to be a figure skater. Her Wikipedia biography says her height of 6 feet (183 cm), together with a domestic accident as a teenager, ended that ambition.
• Brigitte Nielsen is recorded at 185 cm here, but her Wikipedia biography gives 1.83 m (6′0″). She modeled in the early 1980s, photographed by Greg Gorman and Helmut Newton, and the press of the time nicknamed her an "Amazon" because of her height.
• Geena Davis and Famke Janssen complete the 183 cm group.
• Brooke Shields is recorded at 182.9 cm, which matches the 6′0″ (1.83 m) in her Wikipedia biography.

Sigourney Weaver (182 cm) is the best-known example of an actress who struggled with her height early. La Vanguardia, which gives her height as 1.82 m, says classmates mocked her for it at school, and her Wikipedia biography says she reportedly reached 180 cm by age 11 and recalled feeling like "a giant spider."

Supermodels: where 180 cm is the norm

The modeling industry is the one field where women of 180 cm or more are expected rather than exceptional, and models make up a large share of this list.

Karlie Kloss, the tallest model on the list at 188 cm, has a runway walk Wikipedia describes as distinguished by her height, among other qualities. She has also spoken about being bullied in high school as a "weird tall alien." Gigi Hadid's agency page at IMG Models lists her at 5′11″ and 180 cm, exactly the figure used here. Kendall Jenner is recorded at the same 180 cm.

Musicians and the tallest women in pop

Two musicians make the top fifteen. Iggy Azalea is recorded at 182 cm, and Taylor Swift at 180 cm. Billboard's artist page describes Swift as standing 5′11″, which is 180.3 cm, so the two figures agree. You can compare her with other singers on her height page.

Who is missing, and where sources disagree

A ranking like this depends on which heights have been recorded, and the La Vanguardia article names one obvious omission: the former basketball player Lisa Leslie, whom it describes as holding the record as Hollywood's tallest woman at 1.95 m, though she has appeared in only a few films. She is not part of this site's thirty-person ranking.

The same article lists Jane Lynch and Saffron Burrows at 1.82 m alongside Janney, Shields, Thurman, Janssen, Macpherson and Weaver. Its figures differ slightly from this site's for several women, which is normal for heights reported in centimeters by one source and in inches by another:

The largest single gap found in research for this page is Brigitte Nielsen, at 185 cm here against 183 cm on Wikipedia.

Being tall in the public eye

A theme runs through nearly every interview cited here: a difficult adolescence followed by acceptance. Christie, Weaver, Kloss and McTeer all described teasing or self-consciousness as teenagers, and Debicki said she felt like an alien. Debicki also put a positive case plainly to La Vanguardia, saying that being tall has no disadvantages unless you become self-conscious and try to hide it.

How these heights compare around the world

The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration's study of a century of height data, published in eLife in 2016, gives a sense of just how far these women sit from the norm. In this site's country data, drawn from that study, the tallest national average for women born in 1996 belongs to Latvia, at 169.8 cm, followed by the Netherlands and Estonia at 168.7 cm. Even in those countries, the shortest woman on this list, at 179 cm, is about 9–10 cm above the average, and Gwendoline Christie is more than 20 cm above it.

At the other end of the scale, the study reports that women born in 1996 in Guatemala average about 149.4 cm, and that women in the Philippines, Bangladesh and Nepal average under 151 cm. Christie would stand roughly 40 cm taller than the average woman in those countries.

The study also shows how much averages can change. Swedish women, the tallest in the world a century ago, averaged only about 160.3 cm in the 1896 birth cohort. South Korean women recorded the largest gain of any group over the century, about 20 cm, moving from among the shortest in the world to the top third. A woman of 180 cm today is therefore exceptional by both historical and modern standards, which helps explain why so many of the women in this ranking describe their height as the first thing people noticed about them.

To see how you measure up against any of these women, add yourself and them to the height comparison tool, or check how unusual a given height is with the height percentile calculator. Nicole Kidman, at 180 cm, is a good reference point for the lower end of this list.