Bradley Cooper

Cooper was born on January 5, 1975, in Abington Township, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, and grew up in the nearby communities of Jenkintown and Rydal. His mother, Gloria (née Campano), worked at KYW-TV, which was then Philadelphia's NBC affiliate. His father, Charles Cooper, worked as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. Cooper's father was of Irish descent, while his mother is of Italian ancestry (from Abruzzo and Naples). He was raised Catholic. He has an older sister, Holly. He had cholesteatoma in his ear soon after his birth and punctured his eardrum when he started diving at an early age. Describing himself as a child, Cooper has said: "I never lived the life of 'Oh, you're so good-looking'. People thought I was a girl when I was little, because I looked like a girl – maybe because my mother would keep my hair really long."He excelled at basketball and enjoyed cooking: "I used to have buddies come over after kindergarten and I'd cook them food. I prided myself in taking whatever was in the fridge and turning it into lasagna."He initially wanted to attend Valley Forge Military Academy and move to Japan to become a ninja. At an early age, his father introduced him to films like The Elephant Man, which inspired him to be an actor. Coming from a family of non-actors, Cooper says his parents initially wanted him to pursue a career in finance and were against acting, but they eventually changed their perceptions when they saw Cooper play the part of Joseph Merrick in an excerpt from the play The Elephant Man. While attending Germantown Academy, he worked at the Philadelphia Daily News. He says that in school, he was neither "the smartest person" nor "the coolest kid" and "really didn't have anything going on!" After graduating from high school in 1993, Cooper attended Villanova University for one year before transferring to Georgetown University, where he majored in English and minored in French. Cooper graduated in 1997 with a Bachelor of Arts with honors. He was a member of the Georgetown Hoyas rowing team and acted with Nomadic Theatre. While at Georgetown, Cooper became fluent in French and spent six months as an exchange student in Aix-en-Provence, France. In his television debut, Sex and the City in 1999, he made a brief appearance opposite Sarah Jessica Parker. Cooper later served as a presenter on the tourism series Globe Trekker (2000), which took him to such places as Peru and Croatia, and had a recurring role in the short-lived series The Street. Cooper had been interested in a career in diplomacy when he auditioned for the master class graduate degree at the Actors Studio and was selected by James Lipton. In 2000, he received an MFA in acting from the Actors Studio Drama School at The New School in New York City. There, he trained with the coach Elizabeth Kemp of whom he says: "I was never able to relax in my life before her." She advised him on many of his films. While studying in New York City, Cooper worked as a doorman at the Morgans Hotel, and briefly interacted with Robert de Niro and Sean Penn in question-and-answer master class sessions, which were later featured episodes of Inside the Actors Studio.