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These famed performers raised themselves up from nothing! Their journeys to Hollywood were worth the wait.
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Ava Gardner
“When you are dirt-poor, and there is no way of concealing it, life is hell,” said Ava, the last of seven children in a North Carolina farming family. As a child, she helped her father in the tobacco fields and ironed shirts in the boardinghouse her mother ran. Ava owned one pair of shoes, which were reserved for school and church. The rest of the time, she went barefoot.
A child of immigrants, Tony only spoke Hungarian until he was 6. He grew up sharing a bedroom behind his father’s tailor shop with his brothers in an unhappy home where his mother suffered from mental illness. In 1933, Tony and his brother Julius were sent to an orphanage for a month because there wasn’t enough food. “I used to shine shoes in front of this hotel,” Tony said at NYC’s Palace Hotel in 2002, “and now I’m sitting here doing an interview. So how do you like that?”
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Debbie Reynolds
The second child of an El Paso, Texas, carpenter, Debbie knew homelessness as a child. “We slept in the park before we had a house,” she said, “and eventually we shared a home — my parents, my grandparents and five uncles, my family, all of us.”
“I acted my way out of poverty,” said Cary, who was born to an alcoholic father and mentally ill mother. The neglect of his early childhood grew worse after the disappearance of his mom when Cary was 11. The boy was eventually told she was dead, but she had actually been institutionalized. “The pain of his upbringing,” says Cary’s daughter, Jennifer Grant. “It motivated him.”
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Barbara Stanwyck
After her mother’s sudden death, Barbara was placed in foster homes. “I was raised by strangers, farmed out,” said the New York native. “Whoever would take me for five dollars a week, that’s where I was.” She dropped out of school at 14 to take a job wrapping packages in a department store.
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Loretta Lynn
Born into the coal mining town of Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, Loretta was the second of eight kids. Her songs tell of her mother working until her fingers bled and her father shoveling coal to make “a poor man’s dollar.” The hardship continued after Loretta wed at 15. “I know what it’s like to be pregnant and nervous and poor,” she said.
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Sophia Loren
“Hunger was a major theme of my childhood,” says Sophia, who was born to an unwed mother in Rome but raised in Pozzuoli, near Naples, which saw heavy bombing during World War II. “My mother was begging for food for us. She’d bring us back a potato, a fistful of rice.” In 1943, the Allied forces marched through and a soldier tossed young Sophia a piece of chocolate, but she didn’t even know what is was.
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Charlie Chaplin
Abandoned by his alcoholic father, Charlie was sent to a London “poorhouse” for the first time at age 7. By the time he was a teenager, he often slept outdoors and stole food to survive. “I preferred to sleep on park benches,” he said.
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Eartha Kitt
Eartha, whose unwed mother sent her to live with family, started working in South Carolina cotton fields at 7. “She was beaten, mistreated, emotionally and physically,” says her daughter, Kitt Shapiro. Shipped off to another relative in New York, Eartha endured another abusive home until she ran away. For a time, she worked in a factory and slept on rooftops.
“Sometimes we didn’t have enough to eat,” said Kirk, who was raised in a “rundown” clapboard house next to factories in upstate New York. “It didn’t have heating,” he recalled. His father, a Russian immigrant, was an abusive alcoholic. To help out, teenage Kirk sold snacks to the mill workers. “I was dying to get out,” he said. “In a sense, it lit a fire under me.”
