Vera Farmiga

Biography

Vera Farmiga is an American actress who received an Academy Award nomination for best performance in her supporting role, opposite George Clooney, in Up in the Air (2009).She was born Vera Ann Farmiga, second of seven children, on August 6, 1973, in Clifton (Passaic County), New Jersey, USA, to Ukrainian parents. She did not speak English until the age of six, and was raised in the strict Ukrainian Catholic home of her mother, Lyuba (Spas), a schoolteacher, and her father, Michael (Mykola) Farmiga, a computer systems analyst. Her younger sister is actress Taissa Farmiga. She attended a Ukrainian Catholic school, then went to public School. Young Vera Farmiga was a shy, nearsighted girl wearing spectacles while practicing her piano, and was switching to contact lenses for dancing. She was touring with a Ukrainian folk-dancing company in her teens.In 1991, she graduated from Hunterdon Central regional high school. She initially dreamed of becoming an optometrist, but changed her mind, and studied acting at Syracuse University's School of Performing Arts. In 1996, she began her professional acting career, making her Broadway debut, as an understudy, in the play "Taking Sides". Her stage credits included performances in "The Tempest", "The Glass Menagerie", "Hamlet" and in a well-reviewed off-Broadway production, "Second-Hand Smoke" (1997). At the same time, she made her television debut as a female lead, "Catlin", opposite then-unknown Heath Ledger, in Fox's adventure series, Roar (1997).In 1998, Farmiga made her big screen debut in the drama, Return to Paradise (1998), then played daughters of Christopher Walken in The Opportunists (2000) and Richard Gere in Autumn in New York (2000). She starred as a working-class mother struggling to keep her life and marriage…