Neve Campbell - Early Life

Early Life

Campbell was born in Guelph, Ontario. Campbell's mother, Marnie (née Neve), is a yoga instructor and psychologist from Amsterdam. Her father, Gerry Campbell, an immigrant to Canada from the East End of Glasgow, Scotland, UK, taught high school drama classes in Mississauga, Ontario — first at Westwood Secondary School (now Lincoln M. Alexander Secondary School), later at Lorne Park Secondary School, and now at Erindale Secondary School. Campbell's maternal grandparents ran a theatre company in the Netherlands and her paternal grandparents were also performers. On her mother's side, Campbell is descended from Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the Netherlands and converted to Catholicism; she has stated, "I am a practicing Catholic, but my lineage is Jewish, so if someone asks me if I'm Jewish, I say yes".

Campbell has three brothers, Christian, Alex, and Damian (aka Damian McDonald). Her parents divorced when she was two years old. At age six, Neve saw a performance of "The Nutcracker" and decided she wanted to take ballet. She and her brother Christian resided largely with their father (who received custody of the two), with regular periods at their mother's home, until Neve was nine years old. At that time, she moved into residence at the National Ballet School of Canada, training there and appearing in performances of The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty. After accumulating a lot of dance injuries, Campbell moved from dancing into acting at the age of 15, when she performed in The Phantom of the Opera at the Canon Theatre in Toronto while attending John F. Ross Collegiate Vocational Institute in Guelph during her time at home.