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:
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable background. They should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in a desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The education of females has been exclusively directed to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty. ... though well to decorate the blossom, it is far better to prepare for the harvest.”
—Emma Hart Willard (1787–1870)