Early Life
Perkins was born in Queens, New York City, the daughter of Jo Williams, a drug treatment counselor and concert pianist, and James Perkins, a farmer, writer, and businessman. Her paternal grandparents were Greek immigrants from Salonika who anglicized their surname from "Pisperikos" to "Perkins" when they emigrated to the United States. Perkins was raised in Colrain, Massachusetts; her parents divorced in 1963. She began working in theatre with Arena Civic Theatre, a non-profit community theatre group based out of Greenfield, Massachusetts. Perkins attended Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school, and then spent three years in Chicago studying acting at the Goodman School of Drama. In 1984, she made her theatrical debut on Broadway in Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs and afterward, worked in a number of ensemble companies, including The New York Shakespeare Festival and the Steppenwolf Theater.
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Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)