Heather Graham was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and grew up in Agoura Hills, California.
Graham is mostly of Irish descent,[1] so naturally she was raised a Catholic, and reports confirm that her upbringing was quite strict.[2] In fact, her parents once threatened to send her to a convent because, as it turns out, she isn't the most devout Catholic girl:
I'd have made a terrible nun. I'm a good Catholic girl in the way that Madonna is. In the sense that I'm not that good at all. If the church is having a hard time recruiting nuns, I'd make an ideal poster girl. 'Become a nun or else end up like her!'[3]
So devout are Graham's parents that they even severed contact with her after she played a stripper in the film, Boogie Nights.[4]
Clearly she's no longer a good Catholic girl, and might have replaced that gap with some vaguely Eastern practices, such as tantric sex therapy[5] and Transcendental Meditation, which, when she appeared on the cover of Time magazine, she was pictured practicing.[6]
But, for our purposes, lapsed Catholic.
Far into left field
Politically, like religiously, Graham has bucked the traditions of her family. She said:
I… [grew] up in a conservative family and feeling that I was much more liberal-minded… Maybe that's why I had to learn how to love and accept myself as I was, not as they wanted me to be.[7]
But to say "more liberal-minded" is a bit of an understatement. She did a PSA for MoveOn.org, one of America's most explicitly liberal organizations. The PSA was meant to encourage support for the "public option," a term referring to the push toward American socialized healthcare.[8]
Plus, she's got a gay rights agenda and has her environmental concerns–both liberal staple issues:
Global warming is really disturbing, and I wish we were taking better care of our environment, our planet. Gay rights — it's crazy that we're trying to regulate people. It's so stupid.[9]
And, naturally, she's an Obama supporter, who she claims to have helped win office in 2008 by sending out "positive energies."[10] However, I would venture a guess that the $1,000 check she sent his campaign probably did a little more good.[11]
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