Adam Savage - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Born in New York City, Savage was raised in Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County New York. He graduated from Sleepy Hollow High School in 1985. His father, Whitney Lee Savage (1928-1998), was a painter, filmmaker and animator known for his work on Sesame Street, and has a permanent exhibit in the Avampato Discovery Museum. His mother is a psychotherapist. His sister Kate Savage is also an artist. As a teenager in Sleepy Hollow, he routinely visited the local bike shop to have flat tires fixed. The shop showed him how to do the repairs himself. From this experience, Savage said, "I realized you could take a bike apart and put it back together and it wasn't that hard...I've been building and putting bicycles together since then."

Adam Savage began acting as a child, and has had five years of acting school. His early credits include voicing animated characters that his father produced for Sesame Street, Mr. Whipple's stock boy "Jimmy" in a Charmin commercial, a helper in the special effects of Star Wars, and a drowning young man saved by a lifeguard in the 1985 Billy Joel music video "You're Only Human (Second Wind)." He attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts for acting for six months before dropping out.

Describing the early abandonment of his acting career, Savage said "...by the time I was, I guess probably nineteen, I had passed on that in favor of doing stuff with my hands – graphic design, assistant animation in New York, and then eventually working in theater in San Francisco, and film special effects. Then MythBusters came along and it was the perfect marriage of two things, performance and special effects." On November 25, 2011, Savage received an honorary doctorate from the University of Twente (Enschede, Netherlands) for his role in the popularization of science and technology.

Read more about this topic:  Adam Savage

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:

    In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.
    Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)

    Your faith an’ trouth yese never get
    Nor our trew Love shall never twain
    Till ye come within my bower
    And kiss me both cheek and chin.

    My mouth it is full cold, Margret,
    It has the smell now of the ground;
    An’ if I kiss thy com’ly mouth
    Thy life days will not be long.
    Unknown. Clerk Saunders (l. 109–116)

    Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.
    Jane Austen (1775–1817)