It’s quite common for celebrities to adopt children, sometimes from very distant places. For example, when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were Brangelina, they adopted a whole brood.
Other celebrities like Sandra Bullock, Sheryl Crow, Tom Cruise and Jamie Lee Curtis have all adopted children. It also works the other way around; There are a number of celebrities who were adopted before they became stars. Here are some notable ones.
Keegan-Michael Key
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Key is a famous comedy actor who has been in countless films, shows and commercials but he is really famous for his Comedy Central show starring Jordan Peele, Key and Peele.
He was adopted at birth by social workers Michael Key and Patricia Walsh. Although his parents divorced when he was young, he remained close to both of them. He recently said he has “many parents.” Both his biological and adoptive parents were mixed race.
When he was in his mid-20s, he searched and found his birth mother. He said that meeting his birth mother “began to enlighten and shatter my myth.”
“The first year I knew her, my (birth) mother visited me…in Detroit and gave me a kind of tour of my life — where I was conceived, where I was born, where she found out she was pregnant. It was incredible… and very emotional. It’s a long, very personal story, but you know, it was a really wonderful, insightful story.”
Jack Nicholson
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He’s one of the greatest actors of all time, so it makes sense that he has a very dramatic origin story. In fact, Nicholson grew up thinking that his mother was his sister and that his grandmother, Ethel May, was his mother.
His mother, June, became pregnant when she was a teenager by a man named Don, who actually had a wife at the time. She was 18 when he was born and was hoping to become famous, so she kept the whole thing very secret.
Eventually, he followed his “sister” to Hollywood, where he was discovered by a producer. He only found out the truth around 1974 when he was in his late 30s and a reporter uncovered some personal information.
Babe Ruth
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That’s right, one of the most popular sports characters of all time has been adopted. Ruth died in 1948 and records of his childhood are not necessarily watertight, but we do know that he was the youngest child of eight.
His parents placed him in St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys and eventually signed over custody of Ruth, who was deemed a descent child. He was not allowed visits, but sometimes he found ways to visit his parents.
It was the parishioners of St. Mary’s who noticed the boy’s apparent talent for baseball, and eventually baseball scout Jack Dunn became his legal guardian in order to avoid a custody order so Ruth could play baseball.
Ice T
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Legendary figure Ice T, real name Tracy Morrow, may be better known for commercials and his role in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit than for spitting bars, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that he had humble beginnings.
When Morrow was young, his parents died in a tragic car accident. He was sent to relatives, but they were unable to adequately care for the boy.
That meant Morrow found herself in foster care in the rugged area of South Central Los Angeles. He found himself in gangs and involved in violence but luckily nothing tragic happened and he is now incredibly wealthy through his artistic endeavors.
Debbie Harry
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Debbie Harry is best known for being the singer of the 1980s new wave punk-pop group Blondie, but she also had a rough childhood. She was abandoned by her mother when she was only a few months old. She found out she was adopted when she was four years old.
She said she used to dream that Marilyn Monroe was her real mother, but that it’s more of a “philosophical thing.”
“I probably used the wrong language in the past. I saw her as the mother of invention or something like that. It had a profound effect on a lot of people,” the singer said.
Her troubled past pushed her forward, she said, and she went to New Jersey and Greenwich Village as a teenager to explore the “darker side of life.”
Jamie Foxx
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Oscar winner Jamie Foxx had an interesting childhood. He was adopted when he was seven months old by the same people who took care of his mother when she was little.
Estelle and Mark Talley took Foxx in and raised him like he was their own, but he didn’t know the truth until he was about five years old. Until then, he just assumed he had four parents and that was it.
He gave Estelle Talley the nickname Granny. She supported the young man’s dreams and aspirations from elementary school. Case in point: Foxx got in trouble for performing in class, but Grandma made a deal with his teachers that if he behaved the rest of the week he could tell jokes for 10 minutes on Fridays. It worked like a dream and the rest is history.
Steve Jobs
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Steve Jobs is one of the most famous people of all time and will probably be remembered in the same way we remember people like Henry Ford and Benjamin Franklin.
Jobs’ birth parents put him up for adoption when he was an infant, and he was subsequently adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs. His father was a Coast Guard machinist and veteran, and his mother was an accountant.
His biological parents were University of Wisconsin graduate students Abdulfattah “John” Jandali and Joanne Schieble.
Nicole Richie
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Nicole Richie is the adopted daughter of singing superstar Lionel Richie. Her biological father is musician Sheila E.’s brother, Peter Michael Escovedo. Lionel Richie said she could move in with him because her parents couldn’t take care of her.
Lionel Richie spoke about how it unfolded during an interview with Piers Morgan:
“I said, ‘While you’re in trouble, the kid is sitting out here in limbo, so I’m going to tell you what I’m going to do, just bring the kid to my house until the tour is over, and then we will that will work out later.’ And so it took about a year for me to just fall in love and she was a little button and of course I was a dad by that point and so I said, ‘Okay, here’s what we’re going to do, you’re going to make everyone make you wish they had adopted you. You’re going to make everyone in your family wish they actually had a chance to get you back,’ and I said, ‘Let’s adopt her.'”
bill clinton
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The 42nd President of the United States wasn’t actually the first President to be adopted. This award goes to the 38th man to hold the office, Gerald Ford. There are also rumors that Abraham Lincoln was also adopted, but unfortunately there is no definitive proof.
Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas, in 1946, and a few months before his mother, Virginia Cassidy Blythe, was born, his birth father died in a car accident. His mother remarried Roger Clinton in 1950, who adopted him.
faith hill
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Faith Hill is one of the most successful female music artists of all time, regardless of genre. She has sold over 40 million records worldwide and has received five Grammy awards. She also had a difficult childhood.
She was born in Mississippi and adopted as an infant. Her adoptive parents told her that her mother was having an affair with a married man and that’s why she abandoned Hill. That ultimately turned out to be wrong, but Hill shared that she always felt like a “gypsy at heart.”
When she found out her mother was a painter, she said it “helped her understand why she had felt like an outsider.” She also found that while her mother gave Hill up for adoption, she would later marry Hill’s biological father and have another child.
Marilyn Monroe
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The prototypical blonde bombshell and actress Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous women in the world in the 1950s and early 1960s. Her unusual beauty means she remains a household name 60 years after her death in 1962 at the age of 36.
Monroe’s mother had a history of mental illness and she never knew her father’s identity. She had a troubled childhood in foster care and orphanages. Several families wanted to adopt her, but her mother never signed the necessary papers.
She eventually moved in with a family friend and later with a relative. She eventually married a 21-year-old neighbor at 16. She met photographer David Conover while working in a munitions factory during World War II, eventually quit to pursue modeling, and the rest is history.
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