Early Life
Willis was born Matthew James Willis in Tooting, London, later moving to East Molesey, Surrey, where he grew up, and later moved to Woking, Surrey. Willis has an older brother, Darren; their parents split up when Matt was 3-years-old. His mother later remarried and had his half-sister, Amanda, who is an ambassador for a charity called Whizz-Kidz. Willis has had three different last names legally whilst growing up; Willis after his birth father, this was changed to Woods after his parents split and later changed to Sargent after his mother married her now current husband. Willis has made it clear that he was a "problem" child, regularly sneaking out of the house by shimmying down drain pipes. He also as a child suffered from brittle bone disease, tunnel vision, asthma and hyperactivity problems.
Willis attended Woking High School after being asked to leave his previous secondary school, before leaving to attend the independent fee-paying Sylvia Young Theatre School in Marylebone, London, where he met his now close friends Lee Ryan, Tom Fletcher, Billie Piper, Jodi Albert, and Amy Winehouse who had openly said that she fancied Matt at school: "Yeah we all loved Matt at school. I fancied him, Everyone did."
Read more about this topic: Matt Jay
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“O, reason not the need! our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)