Early Life
Campbell was born in Streatham, South London, the daughter of Jamaican-born dancer Valerie Morris. In accordance with her mother's wishes, Campbell has never met her father, who abandoned her mother when she was four months pregnant, and who went unnamed on her birth certificate. She took on the surname Campbell from her mother's second marriage. Her half-brother, Pierre, was born in 1986. Campbell is of Afro-Jamaican descent, as well as of Chinese Jamaican ancestry through her paternal grandmother, who carried the family name Ming.
During her early years, Campbell lived in Rome, where her mother worked as a modern dancer. Following their return to London, she was left in the care of her maternal grandmother, Ruby, while her mother travelled across Europe with the dance troupe Fantastica. At five years old, Campbell was enrolled at the Barbara Speake Stage School, and at the age of ten, she was accepted into the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, where she studied ballet.
Read more about this topic: Naomi Campbell
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Miró and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.”
—Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923)
“Among the earliest institutions to be invented, if I read the stars right, is a Protestant monastery, a place of elegant seclusion where melancholy gentlemen and ladies may go to spend the advanced session of life in drinking milk, walking the woods & reading the Bible and the poets.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)