20 Classic Hollywood Stars Who Grew Up Dirt Poor

Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, grew up without knowing who her father was. Her mother, Gladys, was committed permanently to a mental institution following a breakdown caused by paranoid schizophrenia. Norma Jeane passed through 12 different foster homes before being sent to the Los Angeles Orphans Home, where she spent two years (1935 to 1937) wearing state-supplied clothes. At the age of 16, she married James Dougherty, a neighbor, simply to escape the orphanage.

When Archibald Leach, later known as Cary Grant, was eleven, his father secretly sent his mother, Elsie, to Glenside Hospital, a psychiatric hospital, and told his son that she had died. He believed she was dead for more than 20 years, finding out the truth in his mid-30s. At 14, Archie dropped out of school to perform with the Pender Troupe, a group of stilt-walkers and acrobats, long before he first adopted the name Cary Grant.

In 1896, when Charlie Chaplin was seven, he and his brother Sydney were sent to the Lambeth Workhouse, which housed the poor. His mother, Hannah, was still alive, but she had experienced multiple mental collapses during his childhood. Chaplin was then sent to the Central London District School, a boarding school for paupers, in Hanwell. Chaplin later said his experience with hunger and poverty inspired The Kid and the Little Tramp.

When Sammy Davis Jr. was 3 years old, his father and uncle placed him on stage with the Will Mastin Trio, a vaudeville troupe. To avoid child labor laws, they dressed the boy in a grown-up’s suit and gave him a fake cigar. Will Mastin, the trio’s manager, told him not to talk while he was in public. Davis toured the segregated circuit during the Depression. He didn’t attend school. In 1943, when he was drafted into the Army, he didn’t know how to read.

Sidney Poitier was born two months early in Miami in 1927, while his Bahamian parents were selling tomatoes there. The doctors thought he would die, and his father bought a small coffin. He lived to see another day and grew up in a house in Cat Island, Bahamas, that had neither electricity nor running water. He dropped out of school at the age of 12. When he got to New York City as a teenager, he only had $3 to his name. He slept in bus station washrooms.

Charles Buchinsky, later known as Charles Bronson, was the 11th of 15 children of Lithuanian immigrant parents in Ehrenfeld, a Pennsylvania coal-mining town. One time, when there were no boys’ clothes left, he wore his sister’s old dress to school. His father died in 1931 when Charles was 10, and the family became even poorer. Despite the legend, he did not begin to mine coal at 10 but did start mining at age 16, earning about $1 a ton.

Clark Gable, born William Clark Gable, was only seven months old when his mother died of a brain disease. His father, an unsuccessful wildcat oil driller, raised him on struggling farms. In 1917, when he was 16, he dropped out of school to take a job at an Akron tire factory. He later became an oil-field roughneck in Oklahoma, then a logger in timber camps in the Pacific Northwest.

Sofia Scicolone, the future Sophia Loren, was born out of wedlock in Rome in 1934, and her father provided no financial support and abandoned the family. She grew up in Pozzuoli, an industrial town south of Naples, where she lived with her mother and grandmother. The city suffered extensive bombing by Allied forces during World War Two, and Sofia’s wartime malnutrition led to her being called Stecchetto or “little stick.” At around 10 years old, she was struck in the chin by shrapnel during an air raid, leaving a scar.

Robert Mitchum’s father was killed in a railroad yard accident in 1919, when Robert was 2; from then on, his mother had to support them all by herself. In 1931, at age 14, Mitchum left home and set off to ride the rails, beg money from farmers, and work as a day laborer digging ditches during the Depression. In 1932, at age 15, he was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah, Ga., and sentenced to hard labor on a county chain gang.

Issur Danielovitch, nicknamed Izzy and later known as Kirk Douglas, was born to illiterate Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father was a junk collector and ragman. When Izzy was a boy, he had more than 40 odd jobs to help support his six sisters and his parents. He delivered papers and sold snacks to the mill workers. In the mid-1930s, he hitchhiked to St. Lawrence University with about $160 and worked as a night janitor and gardener.

Lucille LeSueur, the future Joan Crawford, had a biological father who disappeared shortly after her birth, and the man who later married her mother also departed. The family sent Lucille to Rockingham Academy, a boarding school in Kansas City, as a “working student.” From 1917 or so until 1919, she cleaned floors, washed clothes, and prepared meals to earn the money for her schooling. There was not much free time for actual classes.

Gladys Smith, later known as Mary Pickford, had a father who died in a workplace accident in 1898, and her mother was left penniless with three children. To avoid being sent to a workhouse, six-year-old Gladys started performing professionally in front of a stage audience that year, becoming the primary breadwinner. For more than 10 years, the family moved from cheap boarding house to boarding house and rode on low-cost trains for theater work.

On Christmas Eve, 1922, Ava Gardner was born the seventh child of tenant farmers in Grabtown, North Carolina. Her father, Jonas, lost the family farm and was plunged into Depression-era destitution. Gardner spent her youth barefoot, picking tobacco and cotton, while her mother rented rooms and prepared meals for students at a teacher’s dormitory. She was spotted by an MGM scout in 1941, at age 18, through a photograph displayed in the window of a New York photography studio.

Born in 1911 in a tenement slum on a Cincinnati riverfront, Leonard Slye lived in abject poverty until his father, a year later, constructed a twelve-by-fifty-foot houseboat from discarded boards, and the family put out on the Ohio River in search of better times. The family later settled on a tiny patch of farmland, and when it didn’t survive the Great Depression, they headed west to California in 1930, camping in roadside migrant colonies and picking fruit before he found his break as a Western singer and performer under the name Roy Rogers.

Born into a cramped Södermalm apartment without running water, Greta Gustafsson, later known as Greta Garbo, grew up in a poor working-class family. Her father, a street sweeper, succumbed to the flu that claimed so many in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1920. When Greta was just 14, she dropped out of school to work as a soap-lather girl, applying shaving cream to customers’ faces in a barbershop before moving to PUB, a Swedish department store, where her clerking caught the attention of people making promotional films.

When Ruby Stevens, the future Barbara Stanwyck, was four years old in 1911, her pregnant mother died after being accidentally knocked off a moving streetcar. Her father deserted the five children to go work on the Panama Canal, and he never came back. Ruby grew up hopping from one foster home to another relative’s apartment, and dropped out of school at 14 to wrap packages and cut patterns for Vogue. By 1944, she was said to be the highest-paid woman in the country.

James Cagney grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side; his father, a bartender, was an alcoholic who died of the 1918 influenza epidemic, forcing James and his older brothers to help care for the family. At age 14, Cagney had his first job as a copyboy for a newspaper; he also worked as a library janitor and boxed in street fights for money. His mother discouraged him from pursuing boxing and encouraged him to learn to dance.

Anthony Quinn’s parents had escaped the Mexican Revolution and settled in East Los Angeles, where his father was killed in an accident in 1926. The 10-year-old Anthony took over as the family breadwinner, picking fruit, polishing shoes, driving delivery trucks, and fighting in professional boxing bouts for five-dollar purses until his 17th match. He wanted to be an actor, but had a speech impediment that he needed to correct; so he worked nights as a janitor at a drama school in return for acting classes.

Dino Crocetti, later known as Dean Martin, knew only Italian until school, and he didn’t have an easy life in Steubenville, Ohio, the steel mill town where he was raised. At 16, he dropped out of school in 1933 to help support his family in the Depression, working steel mill shifts, bootlegging liquor across state lines, boxing as an amateur under the name Kid Crochet, and dealing cards in Steubenville’s speakeasies and gambling halls like the Rex Club.

When Lucille Ball was three years old, her father died of typhoid fever, and the family lived off her grandfather. Then, in July 1927, when she was 15, a target-shooting accident on her grandfather’s property left a neighborhood boy paralyzed, resulting in a lawsuit, Erickson v. Hunt. The legal action cost her grandfather his estate; the Ball family lost their house, furniture, and all their savings, and the incident gave Lucille an intense desire to have total control of her finances, something that would influence her choices at Desilu, the production company she later co-founded.

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