Tony Curtis
Celebrities : Tony Curtis
Tony Curtis (Bernard Schwartz), the eldest of three sons of a Manuel and Helen Schwartz, was born on June 3, 1925, in New York City. Curtis grew up in an impoverished section of the Bronx, and had joined a street gang by the age of eleven. He joined the Navy in 1943, and upon his release from active duty, he returned to New York where he used the GI Bill to war, attend the City College of New York. He took acting lessons at the Dramatic Workshop and first gained attention in a Greenwich Village stage production of “Golden Boy”. He was quickly offered a seven year contract by Universal Pictures. In 1948 he headed for California where his screen debut had him dancing with Yvonne de Carlo in Criss Cross (1948). His few seconds on screen were enough to generate tens of thousands of fan letters a week asking for a lock of his hair. Universal realized it had a rising star. Soon afterward, his good looks made him a matinee idol, initially under the name James Curtis, and then Anthony Curtis. Read more »
Val Kilmer
Childhood Of Celebrities : Val Kilmer
Kilmer, the second of three sons, was born in Los Angeles, California to Gladys (Ekstadt) and Eugene Kilmer, an aerospace equipment distributor and real estate developer. Kilmer has Scottish, Irish, Sephardic Jewish, Cherokee Native American (from a paternal great-grandmother), Swedish, German and distant Mongolian ancestry. Kilmer’s paternal grandfather was a gold miner in New Mexico; the poet Joyce Kilmer is a second cousin of Kilmer’s. Kilmer grew up in the San Fernando Valley with his two siblings, older brother Mark and younger brother Wesley, but says that even as a child growing up in California he did not like it there.
Kilmer, who was raised a Christian Scientist, attended Chatsworth High School, where he attended with Kevin Spacey, and Mare Winningham as well as Hollywood’s Professional’s School. He also attended Berkeley Hall School, a Christian Science school, from elementary school up until 9th grade. At the age of seventeen, he was at the time the youngest person to be accepted into Juilliard’s drama program.
Technorati Tags: Celebrities, Famous, Pictures, Actor, Val Kilmer
Viggo Mortensen
Childhood Of Celebrities : Viggo Mortensen
Mortensen was born in New York. His Danish father, Viggo Peter Mortensen (a farm manager), and American mother, Grace Gamble Atkinson, met in Norway. His maternal grandfather was Canadian. When he was two years old he moved with his family to Argentina and lived there until age eleven, when his parents divorced and his mother moved back to New York, and Viggo moved with his father to Copenhagen, Denmark. Viggo and his father eventually went back to the United States, and Viggo finished High School at Watertown High School. After that, he moved back to Denmark, and became a truckdriver in Esbjerg, Denmark, before, again, eventually moving back to to the United States to pursue an acting career. He attended St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, earning a degree in Spanish, a subject in which he could get good grades without a lot of study, leaving him free to be in a lot of plays. At his commencement, he refused to wear an academic gown because they were made by sweatshop workers; however, after the Lord of the Rings trilogy, when he was granted an Honorary Doctorate by his alma mater, he did appear in the appropriate robes.
Technorati Tags: Celebrities, Famous, Pictures, Actor, Viggo Mortensen
