In A World Obsessed With Nepo Babies, Here Are 25 Celebs Who Actually Made It On Their Own
“I don’t think I could have been any poorer — I was eating McDonald’s sauces.”
For the past few years, nepo babies and celebrities born into serious wealth have dominated headlines. So, I thought it would be interesting to look into the opposite — people who were born in poverty and still came out on top:
The actor grew up in a council house (British public housing). During an episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast, she called her childhood and the relationship with her father “traumatic.” Maisie recalled a teacher asking her if she’d had breakfast when she was 8 years old. “I said, ‘No.’ And she said, ‘Oh, why not?’ And I said, ‘We just didn’t have any breakfast.’ And then she says, ‘Well, do you usually have breakfast?’ And I’m like, ‘No, not really.'”
In a video posted to Facebook, the TV show host said his mother bought a travel magazine at the grocery store once a month while he was growing up. His father would get angry about spending money frivolously when they had none. “‘We ain’t got no money to take this boy nowhere,'” he recalled his mother saying. “‘But if he can look in these magazines, maybe one day, it’ll cause him to want to travel.'” He thanked his mother for planting that seed in him.
The singer’s mother had her at 16 years old. Selena’s parents divorced five years later, and she was raised by her mother in Texas. She told Elle, “I can remember about seven times when our car got stuck on the highway because we’d run out of gas money.”
The actor spent his childhood stealing from the grocery store and eating at soup kitchens. His family was often homeless and moved constantly, sometimes living in a tent in the woods or squatting in an office space.
The actor lived in hostels until he was 2 years old and grew up on a council estate (public housing for low-income people). He told the British Blacklist, “I don’t think I could have been any poorer — I was eating McDonald’s sauces.”
6. Jessica Chastain
The actor’s single mother had trouble putting food on the table. “We did not have money,” she told the Irish Times. “There were many nights when we had to go to sleep without eating. It was a very difficult upbringing. Things weren’t easy for me growing up.”
7. Rosario Dawson
The actor was born to a single, teenage mother. “We moved to Manhattan when I was 5, but we lived in a slumlord apartment, so we moved to a squat in the Lower East Side,” she told the Columbus Dispatch. “We had cast-iron stoves, plastic for windows, and plywood for a door. You had to bring buckets upstairs to shower.”
8. Hilary Swank
The actor grew up in a trailer park in Washington State. She told Together magazine, “I had a roof over my head and I had food, and so it wasn’t that being poor and having those experiences was a negative. The negative part of it was learning about class at such a young age, not from my friends, but from my friend’s parents, who would say, ‘You aren’t to hang out with her.’ At 6 years old, to have a parent say, ‘You’re not welcome in our home, you need to go.'”
9. Leonardo DiCaprio
During a 2014 interview with the Los Angeles Times, the actor recalled “crime and violence everywhere” in his neighborhood in LA. He said, “I grew up very poor, and I got to see the other side of the spectrum.” After being beat up in school, he told his mom, “‘I want to be an actor. Please take me to auditions.’ Because I had to get out of that public school system.”
10. Viola Davis
The actor has been open about the food insecurity she faced as a child. During a speech, she said, “I’ve stolen for food. I jumped in huge garbage bins with maggots for food. I had befriended people in the neighborhood who I knew had mothers who cooked three meals a day for food, and I sacrificed a childhood for food and grew up in immense shame.”
11. Sarah Jessica Parker
The actor was one of eight children, and her family could only get by on welfare. During an interview with the New York Times, she said, “I remember being poor. There was no great way to hide it. We didn’t have electricity sometimes. We didn’t have Christmases sometimes, or we didn’t have birthdays sometimes, or the bill collectors came, or the phone company would call and say, ‘We’re shutting your phones off.'”
12. Demi Moore
The self-described “trailer park kid” moved 30 times throughout her childhood. At 16, she dropped out of school and moved away from her alcoholic parents to escape an abusive home. “You could either be trapped by what was going on around you, or you could find a way out,” she told the Guardian. “I think that everything, even if it is scary or good, comes into our life to help elevate and expand us as human beings.”
13. Oprah Winfrey
The talk show host grew up in abject poverty in rural Mississippi. Her home had no running water, and she sometimes wore overalls made from potato sacks.
14. Jim Carrey
When his father lost his job, the family ended up living in a car, then lived in tents on campsites around Ontario. At 15, Jim worked as a janitor and security guard to help support his family.
15. Kelly Clarkson
“We lived prepay check to prepay check,” she told the Dallas Morning News. “I was like, whatever I’m gonna do, I just don’t wanna have to worry [like] that. I always used to hate when people would be like, ‘Money doesn’t buy everything,’ when you are little and poor. Rich people say that, not poor people. I don’t know one poor person that’s going, ‘Money doesn’t buy happiness.’ It pays you to get out of eviction notices.”
16. Tyler Perry
The actor grew up in a poverty-stricken and abusive home. He poured all the money he made into his first play and lived in his car for months while he worked on the production.
17. Camila Alves McConaughey
Born to a family of farmers in Brazil, she moved to the US when she was 15. “I didn’t have the luxury to call my parents to pay my bills,” she told Austin Woman Magazine. “I cleaned houses and worked in restaurants as I learned English and saved to go to New York to look for an agency to represent me.”
18. Dolly Parton
As one of 12 children, the singer grew up in a tin-roofed shack with no electricity and no running water in the mountains of Tennessee. Her parents paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal.
19. Céline Dion
As the youngest of 14 siblings, the singer grew up in a working-class home in Quebec. “We were three, four in the same bed,” she told CBS News. “I did not have a bedroom. Up the stairs, before going in the bedrooms, there was a little ramp. And my bed was there. So everybody went up, they saw me, and I could wave goodbye and good night.”
20. Cardi B
“I have real good parents, they poor,” she told Global Grind in 2016. “They have regular, poor jobs and whatnot. They real good people and everything, I was just raised in a bad society.”
21. Shania Twain
One of five kids, the singer often went to school hungry. “It’s very hard to concentrate when your stomach’s rumbling,” she told ABC News. She recalled becoming jealous of the other kids’ lunches. “I would certainly never have humiliated myself enough to reach out and ask for help and say, ‘You know, I’m hungry. Can I have that apple that you’re not going to eat?’ I didn’t have the courage to do that.”
22. Mary J. Blige
After the singer’s father abandoned the family when she was 4, she grew up in the housing projects of New York. During an interview with Oprah, she said, “Life was about surviving —getting money any way you could.”
23. Leighton Meester
The actor was born while her mother was serving federal time for drug trafficking, and lived with her grandmother until her mom was released. When Leighton began taking acting classes as a teen, she preferred the ones with adults because she couldn’t relate to her peers. “‘Jimmy doesn’t like me!’ Who cares? I was worried we didn’t have gas money or food. Those were my concerns,” she told Marie Claire during an interview.
24. Mariah Carey
The singer grew up in an abusive household and moved 13 times throughout her childhood. On an episode of CBS News Sunday Morning, she said, “I came from, you know, a broken and dysfunctional family without money for things that most people have — when I say without money, I mean, like, we really didn’t have much of anything!”
25. And finally, Halle Berry
When the actor moved to NYC to pursue an acting career, she ran out of money three months later and moved into a homeless shelter. “That was rough,” she told People. However, “Giving up was never an option… Shelter life was part of figuring it out for a minute until I could get a waitressing job. Then I got a bartending job, and until I could figure that out, that’s what I did.”
Know any other celebs who were born into poverty and climbed their way to success? LMK in the comments below!
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