Actors Who Were Born With A Silver Spoon

Zoë Kravitz — daughter of singer Lenny Kravitz and actress Lisa Bonet — grew up with plenty of green branches on her money tree, but having superstar parents didn't immediately translate to blockbuster opportunities. Zoë told Nylon she couldn't even get an audition for The Dark Knight Rises because the movie makers allegedly said they weren't "going urban." Oof. "It was like, What does that have to do with anything?'" Zoë quipped. "I have to play the role like, 'Yo, what's up, Batman? What's going on wit chu?'" Batman didn't work out for the young Kravitz, but Zoe did land roles in big films such as X-Men: First Class, The Brave One, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Divergent. 

This celeb kid said she realizes she grew up privileged and credits her parents with trying to keep her grounded. They even made her do chores, not because they didn't have a housekeeper, but because of the "principle," she told Nylon. "I knew we were very lucky, and my dad raised me in an old-school way. It was about having respect for your elders and being thankful for what we had."

Star of the Kroll Show and one of many funny people on The League, Nick Kroll grew up in an affluent area of Westchester, N.Y. and is the son of Jules B. Kroll, the founder of the multi-million dollar corporate investigations company Kroll, Inc. The company's big claim to fame, according to Vanity Fair, was that it "helped the Kuwaiti government locate Saddam Hussein's secret assets."

Kroll insists he didn't grow up like the arrogant rich folk he so excellently parodies on the Kroll Show, like his Aspen Bruckenheimer. "We didn't even have our own tennis court growing up!" Kroll joked to Vanity Fair. However, he did relay a story to Forbes about a time when his dad picked him up from school in a limo. "That was not funny at all," Kroll said, "In fact, there was nothing more horrific to me than that. It was embarrassing."

Armie Hammer, who starred opposite Henry "Superman" Cavill in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., became famous playing the Winklevoss twins in David Fincher's The Social Network. Playing a pair of rich kids probably wasn't too much of a stretch, since Armie is the great-grandson of oil tycoon Armand Hammer. 

Speaking with Mr. Porter, Armie said he refuses to apologize for his charmed upbringing, which included living in the Cayman Islands. "There is that misconception that, 'Oh, you grew up in a wealthy family so you must have got it easier,'" Armie told the fashion magazine. "I probably had opportunities that other people didn't have. But I guarantee that other people didn't have [parents] beating into their skull that they were the 'representation of the family.' That was not the easiest pill to swallow. People might look at me and think my life is so perfect, but everybody wrestles with the same demons."

Funnily enough, Armie's great-great-grandfather, Julius Hammer, reportedly founded New York's Communist Party. The apples fell pretty far from the tree on that one.

Both Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal come from a well-off family in Los Angeles. They're the children of director Stephen Gyllenhaal and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Naomi Achs. While both siblings have enjoyed show business success, they can also trace their roots back to a line of Swedish nobility through their father.

For Maggie, growing up alongside her dad on set in Hollywood almost put her off the business entirely until she found her way after a stint with New York academia. "Movie sets work like the army. Everyone has a job. If you're extra, you're in the way," she told The Guardian, explaining why she left Los Angeles at 18 to study English at Columbia University.  

But don't ask Jake about it. An interviewer with Esquire made the mistake of assuming his childhood was "magical, like it's the Oscars in your kitchen every morning," and the whole interview almost ended. 

"I had a wonderful upbringing, don't get me wrong," said Jake, whose godmother is Jamie Lee Curtis. "But I don't look at the world through rose-coloured glasses. I wasn't raised to be separate from reality." He also reiterated that his parents were scrappers who had a good run of "two or three" projects that got made at once, "but from then on out, it was just trying to get something made and most of the time not succeeding." 

Okay, Jake, we get it. Your childhood that also included Paul Newman taking you racing at 15 years old was totally typical.

Like so many successful actors, Gwyneth Paltrow was born to a Hollywood power couple. Her mother is actress Blythe Danner, who's booked countless film and TV roles over the last several decades, most notably opposite Robert De Niro in the Meet the Parents films. Her father, Bruce Paltrow, was a successful TV producer, who made his name on shows like St. Elsewhere.

Gwyneth, who has since become the epitome of privileged excess with the creation of her outrageous lifestyle brand, GOOP, once tried to eschew her Tinseltown upbringing as your standard childhood fare. She even threw in the old "struggling actress" cliché to boot. Speaking with CNBC, she said, "I remember when I got this apartment with a roommate and I was a hostess in a restaurant and I was auditioning. It was right when Starbucks came out, and I was obsessed with Starbucks, and I remember one morning looking under the sofa for quarters to buy a Starbucks." 

If you're thinking to yourself right now that no normal persons says "buy a Starbucks" when referring to the purchase of a cup of coffee, consider this: At literally any time in her life, Gwyneth probably had enough money laying around in her furniture to buy an entire Starbucks franchise, which is what we assume she actually meant.  

Oscar-nominated actor Paul Giamatti had a pretty cushy life growing up, all thanks to his father, A. Bartlett Giamatti. Bartlett spent years teaching at Yale before eventually serving as president of the esteemed university for nearly 10 years. After Yale, papa Giamatti set his sights on baseball and became president of the National League and then Commissioner of Major League Baseball. With all that in mind, it's no wonder his son got the lead role on a show called Billions.

Speaking to The Guardian, Paul described his family as having been "comfortably middle class," although a quick Google search reveals that in 2014, then-MLB-commissioner, Bud Selig, was making $22 million per year. Granted, that's long after Giamatti's father's death in 1989, but we can't imagine the position has gone from a "middle class" wage to that startling salary in just a few decades.

Ansel Elgort, star of Baby Driver and the Divergent series, grew up in the upper-class world of New York City. According to Time, His parents were famous in the arts community, particularly his fashion-photographer father, Arthur Elgort, who has spent decades shooting for high-end publications such as Vogue. His mother, Grethe Barrett Holby, has enjoyed a successful career as a director of opera.

In a family profile for Town & Country, Elgort's fame was described as something of a foregone conclusion. He was a born performer and a natural in front of his father's lens, although his parents' wealth and influence certainly helped things along. His mother tricked him into auditioning for the School of American Ballet when he was just 9-years-old, and when he was in fifth grade, she reportedly yanked him out of "the fancy Manhattan prep school" he attended when he failed to land the part he wanted in the school play. By the time he graduated from La Guardia High School for the Arts — the school made famous by the movie Fame – he'd already landed his first professional acting gig in an off-Broadway play, which in turn caught the eye of a casting agent who recruited him to audition (successfully) for the 2013 Carrie reboot. 

Like we said, being talented helps, and having rich, famous parents makes it even better.

As it turns out, most of the cast of Girls had little-to-no money problems growing up. Take Allison Williams, for example. Her father is TV journalist Brian Williams, who for years, enjoyed an insanely successful career as the anchor of NBC Nightly News. His career has since been plagued by scandal, but yeah, he's still got plenty of cash, and certainly did while Allison was growing up.

In fact, Allison even acknowledged to the Los Angeles Times that she "100 percent" knew that a big reason she was cast in the 2017 horror flick, Get Out, was because "to some, she's the embodiment of the privileged white girl." While she's aware of where she came from, she's also glad to have carved her own path in the business. "It took years, and a lot of diligence on my part," she said. "But I've formed my own thing, and now I get people who are surprised to find out he's my dad. I dreamed that would happen, and it has: I'm no longer introduced to people as Brian Williams' daughter." 

Um, sure.

Four-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams is the daughter of Larry R. Williams, a Montana-born author and financier, who made two unsuccessful bids for the United States Senate in 1972 and 1982. Larry — who now lives in the U.S. Virgin Islands (not bad!) — contemplated a third run for Senate in 2013, but never followed through, according to reports.

Just how wealthy Larry actually is isn't a matter of public record. However, The Missoulian reported that the IRS once charged him with "evading payment of $1.5 million in income taxes from 1990 to 2001." That breaks down to more than $136,000/year owed in federal taxes, and it doesn't take a math whiz to figure out that translates to some seriously high earnings.

Given her father's lucrative career in radio and television, it's no wonder Sigourney Weaver entered show business. Weaver's dad, Sylvester Laflin "Pat" Weaver, Jr., worked at NBC from 1949 until 1956, serving as president of the network in his final three years. According to his obituary in The New York Times, Pat is credited with creating Today and Tonight and was a champion of the now-famous Meet the Press.

Speaking with The Guardian about her famous parentage, Sigourney said she learned "the satisfaction that comes from striving and seeing a dream fulfilled" from observing her dad's work. She also drew inspiration from her mother, English actress Elizabeth Inglis, who "left her family behind" and moved to America to pursue her own dream in the creative arts.  

Everyone knows Jennifer Aniston was writing her own checks long before she and the rest of the cast of Friends started famously and historically making $1 million per episode in 2002, but it's no surprise that she was drawn to the business in the first place. Her father, John Aniston, has been a working actor since the '50s, most notably as villain Victor Kiriakis on the soap opera Days of Our Lives. Her mother, Nancy Dow, also dabbled in the business in the '60s.

Unlike the support many others on this list enjoyed from their parents, Jennifer had a bit of a rough ride. Her folks split when she was 9, according to Rolling Stone, at which point she went to live with her mother and had "little contact" with her dad for years. The situation flipped after her mother penned her 1996 memoir, From Mother and Daughter to Friends, which Jennifer perceived as "a betrayal." The rift even resulted in Dow not attending her daughter's wedding to actor Brad Pitt in 2000.

The actress reconciled with both parents in later years, although Dow reportedly cut Jennifer out of her will prior to her death in 2016. Something tells us Jennifer — with her net worth as of this writing hanging around $200 million — won't miss that money.

Like Olivia Wilde, model and actress Cara Delevingne is the progeny of high society folk. According to Vogue, her mother, Pandora Delevingne, was "a London society beauty," who is also the daughter of "Sir Jocelyn Stevens, a publishing magnate, and Jane Sheffield, lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret." Her father is Charles Delevingne, a successful property developer who raised his three girls in the posh London neighborhood of Belgravia, where the average home prices, as of this writing, are north of 3 million U.S. dollars.  

"I grew up in the upper class, for sure. My family was kind of about that whole parties–and–horse racing thing," Cara told Vogue, adding, "I can understand it's fun for some. I never enjoyed it." She also revealed that behavioral problems and mental health issues landed her in a couple different fancy boarding schools. She dropped out of the last one. While Cara may not have enjoyed her upper-class upbringing, the boarding school education it provided eventually paved the way for her modeling career, which began at 18-years-old when she was "noticed by an agency executive whose daughter was a schoolmate."

Legendary actress Glenn Close is the daughter of famed physician William Taliaferro Close, whom she told The Hollywood Reporter "spent years in Congo, at one point as Congolese leader Mobutu Sese Seko's personal physician." Though her father's work resulted in Close experiencing a globe-traipsing childhood, including living in "a very glamorous, exclusive hotel" in Switzerland, it also resulted in her being swept into a "right-wing religious cult" called the Moral Re-Armament or MRA.

For years, Glenn reportedly maintained ties to the MRA, even after leaving Switzerland to attend "the elite Connecticut boarding school Choate Rosemary Hall" when she was 15 years old. She finally broke free for good at age 22 when she attended the College of William & Mary, the prestigious school described as "public ivy" by Forbes.

Kate Hudson was born #blessed. The daughter of actress Goldie Hawn and stepdaughter of actor Kurt Russell grew up in the public eye, but she told The Independent that she "had a traditional upbringing, progressive, but very family-value-oriented." She's also made it clear that being born filthy rich was not viewed as reason for lethargy. "The work ethic in our family is really huge," she told the No Limits with Rebecca Jarvis podcast (via ABC News). "...It was just basically, 'Do your job. Do it the best you can.'" 

Despite her parents' acting chops and sage advice, Hudson told Rolling Stone that she flaked on her first big break with the Santa Monica Playhouse. An 11-year-old Hudson was "scared" and "just couldn't do it," she said. Clearly, Hudson grew out of that phase and wound up being quite good at this acting thing. Known for movies such as How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, Almost Famous, Deepwater Horizon, and Mother's Day, the Oscar-nominated actress remains a red carpet staple, runs a production company with her family, and leads her own Fabletics activewear line. All that, and yet Hudson says she never felt pressured to pursue fame and fortune. "One of the reasons I am so close to my mom is that she gave me the freedom to let me be who I am, and giving advice is far from how she parented," she told Popsugar.