Early Life and Education
Blair was born Selma Blair Beitner in Southfield, in the Metropolitan area of Detroit, Michigan; the youngest child of Elliot and judge Molly Ann Beitner (née Cooke). Blair had a Jewish upbringing and was given the Hebrew name Batsheva. Her parents divorced when Blair was 23, she subsequently legally changed her last name. She has three older sisters, Katherine (a book publicist), Elizabeth and Marie Beitner. She was raised by her single mother.
Blair attended Hillel Day School, a Jewish day school in Farmington Hills and Cranbrook Kingswood in Bloomfield Hills; soon after, she spent her freshman year (1990–91) in Kalamazoo College, where she studied photography and acted in a play called The Little Theater of the Green Goose.
Later, Blair moved to New York City to pursue her photography career, living at the Salvation Army. She attended NYU as well as acting classes at the Stella Adler Conservatory, the Column Theatre and the Stonestreet Screen Acting Workshop; later she returned to Michigan to finish her studies and then start an acting career.
After transferring from New York University, she graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 with a BFA degree in photography, a Double major in Fine Arts and English and a BA in Psychology.
Read more about this topic: Selma Blair
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“Individually, museums are fine institutions, dedicated to the high values of preservation, education and truth; collectively, their growth in numbers points to the imaginative death of this country.”
—Robert Hewison (b. 1943)