Edward Norton

Edward Harrison Norton was born into a progressive Episcopal family in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 18, 1969. He is descended from John Norton, a British architect of the Victorian Gothic revival style. He was raised in Columbia, Maryland. His father, Edward Mower Norton Jr., served in Vietnam as a Marine lieutenant before becoming an environmental lawyer and conservation advocate working in Asia and a federal prosecutor in the Carter administration. His mother, Lydia Robinson "Robin" Rouse, was an English teacher who died of a brain tumor in 1997. Norton's maternal grandfather, James Rouse, was the founder of The Rouse Company and co-founder of the real estate corporation Enterprise Community Partners. He has two younger siblings, Molly and James. At age five, Norton and his parents saw a musical related to Cinderella at the Columbia Center for Theatrical Arts (CCTA), starring his babysitter, which ignited his interest in the theater. He enjoyed watching films with his father as a pre-teen, but later reflected that he was fascinated with the cinematography rather than the acting. Norton recalled that it was theater and not films that inspired him to act. He made his professional debut at the age of eight in the musical Annie Get Your Gun at his hometown's Toby's Dinner Theatre. At the CCTA, he acted in several theatrical productions directed by Toby Orenstein. In 1984, Norton won the acting cup at Pasquaney, an annual summer camp for boys in Hebron, New Hampshire, where he later returned as a theater director. He subsequently immersed himself in films, naming Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro as two of his early inspirations because "the ones [he] liked were also the ones who made [him] think [he] could do it because they weren't the most handsome guys". He graduated from Wilde Lake High School in 1987. He attended Yale College, where he earned a BA in History. While there, he also studied Japanese, acted in university productions, and was a competitive rower. After graduating from Yale in 1991, conversant in Japanese, Norton worked not-for-profit as a representative for his grandfather's company, Enterprise Community Partners, in Osaka, Japan.