Early Life and Family
Bell was born and raised in Huntington Woods, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Her mother, Lorelei (née Frygier), is a registered nurse, and her father, Tom Bell, is the television news director for WOAI-TV in San Antonio. Her parents divorced when she was two years old, and she has two half sisters, Sara and Jody, from her father's second marriage. Bell is of Polish and Scottish descent. Bell has strabismus, which affects her right eye. She inherited it from her mother, who had it corrected as a child. Bell claims that if she does not get enough sleep, it aggravates the ailment. She calls her right eye "Wonky".
Bell stated that she did not like her first name at the age of four. Her mother convinced Bell to go by her middle name of Anne instead; she used the name Annie until high school.
Just before her freshman year of high school, Bell's parents decided to pull her from the public school system. She then attended Shrine Catholic High School in nearby Royal Oak, where she took part in the drama and music club. During her time at the school, she won the starring role in the school's 1997 production of The Wizard of Oz, as Dorothy Gale and also appeared in productions of Fiddler on the Roof (1995), Lady Be Good (1996), and Li'l Abner (1998). In 1998, the year she graduated, Bell was named the yearbook's "Best Looking Girl" by senior class vote.
When Bell was 17, her best friend, whom she met at age 11 during a Detroit community theater production, was killed in an automobile accident. Bell said that it was "both the best and worst thing that has ever happened to me. Once you learn not to take people for granted, you live a lot happier life".
Shortly after her high school graduation, Bell moved to New York City to attend the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, majoring in musical theater. In 2001, during her senior year at New York University, Bell left a few credits shy of graduating to take a role in the Broadway musical version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Read more about this topic: Kristen Bell
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or family:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
—Diane Arbus (1923–1971)
“My Friend is not of some other race or family of men, but flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. He is my real brother.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)