Early Life
Mortensen was born in New York City. His mother, Grace Gamble (née Atkinson), was American, and his father, Viggo Peter Mortensen, Sr., was Danish; the two met in Norway. His maternal grandfather was from Nova Scotia, Canada, and his maternal grandmother's family was from New England.
The family moved to Venezuela, then Denmark, and eventually settled in Argentina, taking residency in the Argentine provinces of Córdoba, Chaco and Buenos Aires, where he attended primary school and acquired fluent Spanish, while his father managed chicken farms and ranches. They remained there until Mortensen was eleven, when his parents divorced. With his mother he returned to New York, where he spent the rest of his childhood, graduating from Watertown High School in Watertown, New York.
He then attended St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, earning a degree in 1980. Afterward, he went to Europe and lived in Spain, England, and Denmark, where he took various jobs such as driving a truck in Esbjerg and selling flowers in Copenhagen. After two years, he returned to the United States to pursue an acting career.
Read more about this topic: Viggo Mortensen
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity—
Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“... it is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)