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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Childhood Of Celebrities : Clive Owen

Owen was born in Coventry, West Midlands, England, the fourth of five brothers. When Owen was three, his father (a country and western singer) left the family. Owen was raised by his mother and step-father, a railway ticket clerk, and only met his father again at the age of nineteen. While initially opposed to drama school, he changed his mind in 1984, after a long and fruitless period of searching for work. Owen graduated from RADA in 1987 in a class including both Ralph Fiennes and Jane Horrocks. After graduation, he won a position at the Young Vic, performing in several William Shakespeare plays. In an incident he later described as “very schmaltzy,” he met his future wife Sarah Jane.

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Childhood Of Celebrities : Mel Gibson

Gibson is a native-born United States citizen, being born in Peekskill, New York, the sixth of eleven children. He is the son of Hutton Gibson and Anne Reilly Gibson, who was born in Columcille Parish, County Longford, Ireland. His paternal grandmother was the Australian opera singer, Eva Mylott. One of Mel’s younger brothers, Donal, is also an actor. Gibson’s first name comes from a 5th century Irish saint, Mel, founder of the diocese of Ardagh containing most of his mother’s native county, while his second name, Columcille is also linked to an Irish saint. Columcille is the name of the parish in County Longford where Anne Reilly was born and raised.

Hutton Gibson relocated his family to Sydney, Australia in 1968, after winning a work related injury lawsuit against New York Central. After a seven day trial on February 14, 1968, the jury awarded him $145,000. The family moved when Gibson was twelve. This move was in protest of the Vietnam War, for which Gibson’s elder brothers risked being drafted. It is also because Gibson’s father, a devout Traditionalist Catholic, believed that the changes to American society which took place during the 1960s were immoral.

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