Teri Hatcher - Early Life

Early Life

Hatcher was born in Palo Alto, California, the daughter of Esther (née Beshur), a computer programmer who worked for Lockheed Martin, and Owen Walker Hatcher, Jr., a nuclear physicist and electrical engineer. Her father is of Welsh descent (Hatcher has said that he also has Choctaw ancestry) and her mother is of half Syrian and half German-Irish ancestry. Teri Hatcher took ballet lessons at the San Juan School of Dance in Los Altos. Her big debut was as the lead flying monkey in a production of The Wizard Of Oz. Hatcher grew up in Sunnyvale, California. and attended Mango Junior High (now Sunnyvale Middle School), Fremont High School in Sunnyvale and De Anza College in Cupertino. As an undergraduate she studied mathematics and engineering.

In March 2006 Hatcher revealed to Vanity Fair that she was sexually abused from the age of five by Richard Hayes Stone, an uncle by marriage who was later divorced by Hatcher's aunt. She said her parents were unaware of the abuse at the time. In 2002 she assisted Santa Clara County prosecutors with their indictment of Stone for a more recent molestation that led his female victim to commit suicide at the age of 14. Stone pleaded guilty to four counts of child molestation and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. In an interview appearing in Vanity Fair, Hatcher said she told the prosecutors about her own abuse because she was haunted by thoughts of the 14-year-old girl who shot herself, and feared Stone might escape conviction. Stone died of colon cancer on August 19, 2008, having served six years of his sentence.

Read more about this topic:  Teri Hatcher

Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or 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)

    We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.
    Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

    I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.
    Richard Louv (20th century)