Jennifer Aniston

Aniston was born on February 11, 1969, in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles to Greek-born actor John Aniston and actress Nancy Dow. One of her maternal great-grandfathers, Louis Grieco, was from Italy. Her mother's other ancestry includes English, Irish, Scottish, and a small amount of Greek. Her father's ancestry is from the Greek island of Crete. Aniston has two half-brothers: John Melick, her older maternal half-brother; and Alex Aniston, her younger paternal half-brother. Her godfather was actor Telly Savalas, one of her father's best friends. Her family moved to New York City when she was a child. Despite her father's television career, she was discouraged from watching television, though she found ways around the prohibition. When she was six, she began attending a Waldorf school. Her parents divorced when she was nine. Having discovered acting at age 11 at the Waldorf school, Aniston enrolled in Manhattan's Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where she joined the school's drama society, and where Anthony Abeson was her drama teacher. She performed in The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window by Lorraine Hansberry and Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov.