The Tallest Female Celebrities, Ranked by Height

Here they are, side by side, at their real heights: Gwendoline Christie and Elizabeth Debicki at 6’3″ (191 cm), Karlie Kloss at 6’2″ (188 cm), Caitlin Clark and Brooke Shields at 6’0″ (183 cm), Uma Thurman at 5’11½″ (182 cm), Nicole Kidman at 5’11″ (180 cm), and Taylor Swift and Zendaya at 5’10″ (178 cm) — with the average woman (5’4″, 161 cm) standing in for scale. On screen, in concert lighting, and on magazine covers, these nine look merely statuesque. Lined up honestly, the tallest of them towers a full head above the average woman.

A word on method before the numbers, because most celebrity-height lists are sloppy in exactly the ways we are about to avoid. Every figure here is cross-checked against at least two independent sources — FIBA’s official player data, the actresses’ own on-the-record statements, NPR’s Hollywood height reporting, and long-standing consensus listings. Where a figure is disputed (Swift, Thurman), we say so loudly and chart the most defensible number, not the flattering one. Hollywood’s standard practice is to round up, add heels, and never speak of it; this chart does the opposite.

The context that makes the chart startling: the average American adult woman stands 5’4″ (161 cm), per measured CDC data. The shortest woman on this list clears that average by 17 cm — nearly seven inches — and the tallest clears it by 30 cm, a full foot. Even the average man, at 5’9″ (175 cm), is shorter than seven of the nine women here. These are not women who are tall “for Hollywood”. They are tall by any standard on Earth.

Gwendoline Christie, at 6’3″ (191 cm), is the tallest well-known actress working in Hollywood today — a figure so consistent across agency listings, red-carpet reporting and her own interviews that it is sometimes given even more precisely as 6’3¼″. She trained as a gymnast as a child until a spinal injury at eleven ended that dream, and when she told her agent she wanted to act, the response was reportedly: “well, good luck with that.” The height that was supposed to disqualify her became her calling card instead: Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones (2012–2019, earning her an Emmy nomination), Captain Phasma in Star Wars, and Larissa Weems in Wednesday. She has described her stature as a “superpower” — and in heels, which she wears often on the red carpet, her presented height can reach roughly 6’7″.

Elizabeth Debicki shares the top step at exactly the same height: 6’3″ (191 cm). The Australian actress used that towering, elegant frame to play Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby, Jed Marshall in The Night Manager, the inverted-world operative in Tenet — and, most famously, Princess Diana in the final seasons of The Crown, where her height became part of the uncanny physical resemblance. Like Christie, Debicki has said she embraces her height as a unique asset, though it regularly forces directors into creative camera angles when she is paired with shorter leading men. Two women, both 191 cm, both turning the same supposed liability into the most distinctive silhouette in the room.

The scale of 191 cm is worth pausing on. A woman of that height sits roughly four and a half standard deviations above the female average — fewer than one woman in a thousand stands that tall. She is taller than about 97 in 100 men. In a crowd of a thousand women, Christie and Debicki would be the two you could spot from the back of the room — and that is before either of them puts on heels.

Karlie Kloss stands 6’2″ (188 cm) — a figure that is universal across listings, from her agency profile to every major biography. Born in Chicago in 1992, she was discovered at thirteen, trained as a ballet dancer, and became a Victoria’s Secret Angel from 2013 to 2015 before building a second career as a tech entrepreneur: she founded Kode With Klossy, the nonprofit teaching girls to code, and went on to run i-D Magazine. Her height was the foundation of the modelling career; her coding nonprofit is what she built on top of it.

The modelling context matters, because 188 cm is tall even where tall is the job description. The standard runway range for women runs roughly 5’9″ to 6’0″ (175–183 cm): designers cut sample sizes for that frame, and agencies rarely sign above it. Kloss clears the top of that range by 5 cm. For comparison, Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner both stand around 5’10″ (178 cm) and Naomi Campbell around 5’9½″ — all tall women, all a full head shorter than Kloss on the same catwalk. Even among professional models, Kloss is an outlier.

One honest caveat, because the sources demand it: model heights are agency-reported figures, and agencies round up — a 6’1½″ model becomes 6’2″ on the comp card, usually with heels already assumed. Kloss’s 188 cm is consistent everywhere it appears, which is the best evidence available, but it is the weakest-sourced figure on this list: the citations are biographical profiles rather than the sports data or on-the-record interviews that anchor the others. We include it because the consensus is overwhelming, and we flag it because that is what honest height reporting does.

Caitlin Clark, at 6’0″ (183 cm), is the only athlete on this list — and the only figure here backed by official sports measurement. FIBA lists her at 183 cm / 6’0″, and the WNBA’s own listings agree. Clark was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft, joining the Indiana Fever and winning Rookie of the Year, and her game is built on the deep shooting range and playmaking that made her a phenomenon at Iowa. Here is the twist the chart makes visible: 183 cm is enormous anywhere except a basketball court. The WNBA average sits around 6’0.8″ (185 cm), which means Clark — the fourth-tallest celebrity on this page — is almost exactly average for her own league. Context is everything.

Brooke Shields reached 6’0″ (183 cm) by the age of fourteen — already looking down at most adult men in the industry while she was still a child model. The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love made her the defining “tall girl” of early-1980s Hollywood, and cinematographers resorted to apple boxes and careful camera angles just to keep her male co-stars in the same frame. NPR’s Hollywood height reporting names Shields, Sigourney Weaver and Jane Lynch as the charter members of the actresses’ 6-foot club — women who, in an era that expected leading ladies to look up at their leading men, had to be shot short instead.

Uma Thurman rounds out the club at 5’11½″ (182 cm) — though some listings round her up to a full 6’0″, which is the second disputed figure on this page. Thurman’s height and athletic build made her a natural fit for the physically demanding role of the Bride in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films, after Pulp Fiction made her an A-lister in 1994. We chart her at 182 cm, the figure the most careful recent listings converge on, and note the 6’0″ listings alongside it. Either way, she clears the average woman by 21 cm — and she did it while headlining the two most physically iconic female action roles of her generation.

Nicole Kidman, at 5’11″ (180 cm), is the only woman on this list whose height comes with her own sworn testimony — because she spent years lying about it in the other direction. Told as a teenager that she was “too tall” to have a career, Kidman used to claim 5’10½″ at auditions; on the Radio Times Podcast in 2024 she finally corrected the record: “I say I’m 5ft 10 1/2in but I’m really 5ft 11in.” She was already 5’9″ at thirteen, was measured out of an Annie audition that required girls under 5’2″, and was teased as “Stalky” at school. The height she once hid is now part of the silhouette that won her an Oscar for The Hours — and, at 10 cm taller than her ex-husband Tom Cruise, it made their red-carpet photos a running study in Hollywood’s height illusions.

Taylor Swift is the list’s genuinely disputed entry, and the dispute runs in the opposite direction from Kidman’s: most listings put Swift at 5’10″ (178 cm), while Swift herself has claimed 5’11″ — telling Vanity Fair she was “five-foot-ten” in one interview and Entertainment Weekly “I’m 5’11”” in another. We chart the listed 178 cm and note the claim, because the gap is instructive: it is almost exactly the standard Hollywood inflation of heels plus generous rounding. Barefoot, photographed next to genuinely tall people, the 5’10″ figure holds up better. Either way, she is one of the tallest women headlining stadiums in the world, and her stagecraft — the boots, the proportions, the sheer scale of the Eras Tour staging — makes the question feel faintly absurd.

Zendaya, also 5’10″ (178 cm), is the cleanest figure of the three — consistent across listings, with no competing claim of her own. Her height nearly cost her the role of MJ in Spider-Man: Homecoming: auditioning opposite Tom Holland, who stands 5’8″ (173 cm), she worried the five-centimetre gap would look wrong on screen. “I was worried because he’s so much shorter than me,” she told Variety. “I was like, ‘Damn it! It’s going to be weird because I’m super tall.’ But then we ended up doing the audition sitting.” She got the part, won two Emmys for Euphoria, and the height difference with Holland became one of the most photographed — and most discussed — celebrity pairings in the world. Our guide to celebrity couples with the biggest height differences has the full story.

Raw inches mislead; percentiles tell the truth. Swift and Zendaya at 178 cm sit around the 99th percentile for adult women — taller than roughly 99 women in 100. Kidman at 180 cm is a touch beyond that. Clark and Shields at 183 cm are around the 99.9th percentile, roughly one woman in a thousand. And Christie and Debicki at 191 cm sit about four and a half standard deviations above the average — fewer than one woman in a thousand, and taller than about 97 men in 100. The bottom of this list is already a statistical rarity; the top of it is a rounding error in the population.

It helps to think in gaps rather than absolutes. Christie gives up nothing to anyone on this page — but set her next to Simone Biles, the shortest major celebrity in the world at 4’8″ (142 cm), and the gap is 49 cm: more than a foot and a half, roughly the height of a two-year-old child, standing between two of the most famous women alive. Set her next to the average woman and the gap is 30 cm — a full ruler. These are the differences your visual system is actually registering when a celebrity looks “surprisingly tall” in person: not the number, but the gap to the people around them.

One final honesty note, because it applies to every figure on this list: listed heights are almost always measured in shoes and rounded up, while barefoot morning height is the true figure — a gap of 2 to 3 cm for most people. That is the entire Taylor Swift dispute (178 vs 180 cm) and most of the Uma Thurman one. Genuine barefoot figures, like Kidman’s own “really 5ft 11in” or FIBA’s measured 183 cm for Clark, are the gold standard; everything else is footwear plus optimism. If this article has you curious about your own number, our guide to measuring your height accurately at home walks through the proper barefoot-against-the-wall technique — and then you can add yourself to the chart above and take your place in the lineup.

The comparison tool at the top of this article is preloaded with all nine celebrities plus the average woman, drawn to true scale. Add your own height and the chart redraws instantly: stand yourself next to Christie and see the 30 cm the average woman gives up; next to Kloss and see whether you clear her 188 cm by a head; next to Swift and check whether the Eras Tour camera angles have been fooling you too.

A few suggested experiments. First, the couples test: pair yourself with a partner and see how your gap compares to Zendaya and Tom Holland’s 5 cm — our guide to celebrity couples with the biggest height differences has more extreme pairings to try. Second, the extremes test: drop in Simone Biles (142 cm) alongside Christie (191 cm) and watch a 49 cm gap open up between two of the most famous women on the planet. Third, the honesty test: measure yourself properly barefoot, in the morning, and compare that figure to what your driving licence claims — most people are carrying 2 to 3 cm of footwear optimism.

And if this list made you curious about the other end of the scale, we have that covered too: our ranking of the shortest celebrities runs from Simone Biles at 4’8″ to Tom Cruise at 5’7″, and the K-pop idol height comparison lines up an industry where the men average a head taller than everyone on this page. Short, tall, or somewhere in between — the chart doesn’t judge. It just draws the truth to scale.