Lisbeth Salander

Lisbeth Salander
Millennium series character
Lisbeth Salander, as portrayed by Noomi Rapace in the Swedish film series.
First appearance	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005)
Last appearance	The Girl in the Spider's Web (2015)
Created by	Stieg Larsson
Portrayed by	Noomi Rapace (Swedish) Tehilla Blad (Swedish, child) Rooney Mara (English)
Information
Aliases	Wasp, Irene Nesser, Monica Sholes
Gender	Female
Occupation	Computer hacker in the Hacker Republic Private investigator at Milton Security
Family	Alexander Zalachenko (father; deceased) Agneta Sofia Salander (mother; deceased) Camilla Salander (twin sister) Ronald Niedermann (half-brother; deceased) Four unnamed half-brothers Three unnamed half-sisters
Nationality	Swedish with Russian ancestry

Lisbeth Salander is a fictional character created by Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson. She is the lead character in Larsson's award-winning Millennium series, along with the journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

Salander first appeared in the 2005 novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (original Swedish title, Män som hatar kvinnor, literally "Men who hate women" in English). She reappeared in its sequels: The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006), The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (2007), and The Girl in the Spider's Web (2015).

In the only interview he ever did about the series, Larsson stated that he based the character of Lisbeth Salander on what he imagined might have been like as an adult. In the Millennium series, Salander has the name "V. Kulla" displayed on the door of her apartment on the top floor of Fiskargatan 9 in . "V. Kulla" is an abbreviation of "Villa Villekulla", the name of Pippi Longstocking's house.

Another source of inspiration was Larsson's niece, Therese. A rebellious teenager, she often wore black clothing and makeup, and told Larsson several times that she wanted to get a tattoo of a dragon. The author often emailed Therese while writing the novels to ask her about her life and how she would react in certain situations. She told him about her battle with anorexia and that she practiced kickboxing (previously jujitsu).

After his death, many of Larsson's friends said the character was created out of an incident in which Larsson, then a teenager, witnessed three of his friends gang-raping an acquaintance of his named Lisbeth, and he did nothing to stop it. Days later, wracked with guilt, he begged her forgiveness — which she refused to grant. The incident, he said, haunted him for years afterward, and in part moved him to create a character with her name who was also a rape survivor. The veracity of this story has since been questioned, after a colleague from Expo magazine reported to Rolling Stone that Larsson had told him he had heard the story secondhand and retold it as his own.