Jean Arthur - Early Life

Early Life

Arthur was born Gladys Georgianna Greene in Plattsburgh, New York to Protestant parents, Johanna Augusta Nelson and Hubert Sidney Greene. Her maternal grandparents were immigrants from Norway who settled in the American West. She had three older brothers: Donald Hubert (1891), Robert B. (1892) and Albert Sidney (1894). She lived off and on in Westbrook, Maine from 1908 to 1915 while her father worked at Lamson Studios in Portland, Maine as a photographer. The product of a nomadic childhood, Arthur also lived at times in Jacksonville, Florida; Schenectady, New York; and, during a portion of her high school years, in the Washington Heights neighborhood - at 573 West 159th Street - of upper Manhattan. The family's relocation to New York City occurred in 1915, where Arthur dropped out of high school in her junior year due to a "change in family circumstances". She reputedly took her stage name from two of her greatest heroes, Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc) and King Arthur. Presaging many of her later film roles, she worked as a stenographer on Bond Street in lower Manhattan during World War I. Both her father and siblings went to war, where her brother Albert died as a result of injuries sustained in battle.