Childhood Of Celebrities : Gwen Stefani

Gwen Stefani was born and raised in Fullerton, California, and grew up in a Roman Catholic household. Her mother named her Gwen after a stewardess in the 1968 novel Airport, and her middle name, Renée, comes from The Four Tops’ 1968 cover of The Left Bank’s 1966 hit song “Walk Away Renée”. Her father Dennis Stefani is Italian American and works as a Yamaha marketing executive. Her mother Patti Flynn is of Irish and Scottish descent and worked as an accountant before becoming a homemaker. Gwen’s parents were fans of folk music and presented music by Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris to her. Gwen is the second oldest of four children; she has a younger sister Jill, a younger brother Todd, and an older brother Eric. Eric was the keyboardist for No Doubt, but left the band to pursue a career in animation on The Simpsons.

Many of the women in Gwen’s family were seamstresses, and much of her clothing was made by her or her mother. As a child, Stefani’s musical interests consisted of musicals such as The Sound of Music and Evita. After making a demo tape for her father, she was encouraged not to take music lessons to train her “loopy, unpredictable” voice. Stefani’s first on-stage performance came during a talent show at Loara High School, where she sang “I Have Confidence” from The Sound of Music in a self-made tweed dress inspired by one from the film. Stefani was on the swim team at Loara, and she worked scrubbing floors at a Dairy Queen and later at the makeup counter of a department store. After graduating from high school in 1987, she began attending California State University, Fullerton.

Credit : Wikipedia

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Childhood Of Celebrities : Denzel Washington

Washington was born in Mount Vernon, New York. His father, Dillwyn, Virginia-born Reverend Denzel Washington, was an ordained Pentecostal minister and also worked for the Water Department and at a local department store, “S. Klein”. His mother, Lennis, was a beauty parlor owner born in Georgia and raised in Harlem. When Washington was fourteen, his parents’ marriage took a turn for the worse, and he and his older sister were sent away to boarding school so that they would not be exposed to their parents’ eventual divorce. He attended grammar school at Pennington Grimes Elementary School in Mount Vernon.

Washington went on to college, attaining a B.A. in Drama and Journalism from Fordham University in 1977. At Fordham he played collegiate basketball under coach P. J. Carlesimo. He still found time to pursue his interest in acting, and after graduation he went to San Francisco, where he won a scholarship to the American Conservatory Theatre. Washington stayed with the ACT for a year, and, after his time there, he began acting in various television movies and made his film debut in the 1981 film Carbon Copy. Although he had a starring role as the illegitimate son of a rich white man, Washington didn’t find real recognition until he joined the cast of the long-running TV series St. Elsewhere in 1982. He won critical raves and audience adoration for his portrayal of Dr. Phillip Chandler, and he began to attract Hollywood notice. In 1987, he starred as anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom, and his powerful performance earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

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Childhood Of Celebrities : Charles Bronson

Bronson was born in the notorious Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania coal-mining neighborhood of Scooptown in the Pittsburgh Tri-State area. He was one of 15 children born to a Lithuanian immigrant father of Lipka Tatar ancestry, and a Lithuanian-American mother.

Bronson’s father died when he was only 10, and he went down to the coal mines like his older brothers until he was drafted. He earned $1 per ton of coal mined. His family was so poor that, at one time, he had reportedly been forced to wear his sister’s dress to school because he had no other clothes. This story has been repeated in Celebrity Setbacks: 800 Stars who Overcame the Odds by Ed Lucaire (ISBN 0-671-85031-8) and in an edition of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!.

In 1943, Bronson joined the United States Army Air Forces and served in the Pacific theater as a B-29 Superfortress tail-gunner. Assigned to the 61st Bomb Squadron of the 39th Bomb Group of the Twentieth Air Force, he flew bombing missions to Japan from North Field, Guam.

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