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.

Read more about this topic:  Jean Arthur

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:

    If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.
    Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)

    Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)