Early Life
Gyllenhaal was born in New York City to film director Stephen Gyllenhaal and film producer and screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal (née Achs). Jake Gyllenhaal, her younger brother, is also an actor. Her father, who was raised in the Swedenborgian religion, is of Swedish and English ancestry, and is a member of the Swedish noble Gyllenhaal family. Her last purely Swedish ancestor was her great-grandfather, a descendant of Leonard Gyllenhaal, a leading Swedenborgian who supported the printing and spreading of Swedenborg's writings. Her mother is Jewish (with ancestors from Russia and Lithuania), from New York City, and is the ex-wife of Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University. Gyllenhaal has stated that she "grew up mostly Jewish, culturally", though she did not attend Hebrew school. Her parents, who married in 1977, filed for divorce in October 2008.
Gyllenhaal grew up in Los Angeles and studied at the Harvard–Westlake prep school. In 1995, she graduated from Harvard–Westlake and moved to New York to attend Columbia University, where she studied literature and Eastern religions; she graduated in 1999 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, she took a summer job working as a waitress in a Massachusetts restaurant.
Read more about this topic: Maggie Gyllenhaal
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