Jacqueline Bisset - Early Life and Family

Early Life and Family

Bisset was born Winifred Jacqueline Fraser Bisset in Weybridge, Surrey, England, the daughter of Arlette Alexander, a lawyer turned housewife, and Max Fraser Bisset, a general practitioner. She was brought up in Reading, Berkshire, where she lived in the suburb of Tilehurst. Her father was Scottish and her mother was of French and English descent; Bisset's mother cycled from Paris and boarded a British troop transport to escape the Germans during World War II. Bisset has a brother, Max. Her mother taught her to speak French fluently, and she was educated at the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in London. She had taken ballet lessons as a child and began taking acting lessons and fashion modelling to pay for them. When Bisset was a teenager, her mother was diagnosed with disseminating sclerosis. In the following years while Bisset was working as an actress in Hollywood, she made frequent trips back home in order to care for her mother, which she says got in the way of her personal relationships.

Bisset's parents divorced in 1968, after 28 years of marriage. Her father died aged 71 of a brain tumour in 1982. Her mother died in 1999.