She once went to bed hungry. Classmates told her daily that she was ugly and that nobody wanted to be her friend. Years later, the whole world would disagree.Growing up in Sacramento, California, this actress did not have what most people would call a head start. Her mother, Jerri, was a vegan chef raising her family alone, and money was perpetually scarce.There were nights, she has recalled, when there simply was not enough food on the table. “We did not have money. There were many nights when we had to go to sleep without eating. It was a very difficult upbringing,” she once told the Irish Times.Yet it was her mother’s relentless sacrifice — and the empathy it instilled — that she credits as one of her greatest gifts. “Because of my mother, I do always try to think about how something must be for someone else,” she added.

Home life was tough, but school was its own battlefield. Every single day, she said, she was told she was ugly. “I was told every day at school that I was ugly. And that no one wanted to be my friend,” she revealed to Glamour magazine.For most children, that kind of sustained cruelty would be crushing. For her, those experiences would eventually fuel a fierce desire to lift others. “If I can do anything to help young girls and to be a cheerleader for people who sometimes have low self-esteem, I want to do that,” she said.Her mother and grandmother were the two pillars holding everything up.While her grandmother was the one who eventually helped her make the leap to New York — shipping care packages of jackets and sweaters to keep her warm through winters unlike anything the family had known — her mother drove her an hour and a half to audition for her first professional theater company, Theater Works in San Francisco.