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, early, life and/or education:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“Next to our free political institutions, our free public-school system ranks as the greatest achievement of democratic life in America ...”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“Since [Rousseau’s] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)