ENLARGE
Actress Rene Russo, 60, has appeared in 25 films, including “The Thomas Crown Affair” and “Get Shorty.” Her new film, “Nightcrawler,” opens Oct. 31. She spoke with Marc Myers.
I grew up in Burbank—but not the Burbank of valet parking and TV studios. In the late 1950s, there was a small apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue that rented mostly to families on welfare. I lived there from age 3 to 11 and again from 14 to 18 with my mother, Shirley, and my younger sister, Toni. It wasn’t pretty.
My mother left Fort Scott, Kan., in 1949 with friends in search of a better life in Los Angeles. There, she met my father, Nino, a stand-in for Tony Curtis. When my sister was born in 1956 and I was 2½, my father abandoned us. We had to move to my mother’s childhood home in Kansas. Four months later, she scraped together enough money to return to California.
Back in L.A., we moved into a ground-floor, two-bedroom unit in the Elmwood Avenue apartment complex. Kids ran around unattended, and the closer you lived to the street’s cul-de-sac, which we did, the more undesirable your neighbors. Many
Article source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/rene-russos-escape-from-elmwood-1412091724
