Mark Ruffalo

Early life and education[edit]

Mark Alan Ruffalo was born on November 22, 1967, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His mother, Marie Rose (née Hébert), is a hairdresser and stylist, while his father, Frank Lawrence Ruffalo Jr., worked as a construction painter.^[2][3] He has two sisters, Tanya Marie (died 2023) and Nicole, and a brother, Scott (died 2008).^[2] His father is of Italian descent, from Girifalco, Calabria,^[4] and his mother is of French Canadian and Italian ancestry.^[5][6] His father was a Bahai, while his mother was Christian. ^[7] “I grew up in a household that had three religions in it, (born-again) Christianity, Catholicism and Bahai’ism, so there were different viewpoints and a lot of debate about that, and I immediately began to understand that all these people that I loved very much had very strong feelings about faith, but all of them were valid to me. I felt that none of them, my grandmother, my father or my mother, was better or worse than the other.”^[8]


Ruffalo attended both Catholic and progressive schools throughout his education. Ruffalo has described himself as having been a "happy kid",^[9] although he struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia and ADHD as a child and a young adult.^[10]


Ruffalo spent his teen years in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where his father worked. He competed in wrestling in junior high and high school in Wisconsin and Virginia. Ruffalo graduated from First Colonial High School in Virginia Beach in 1986, where he acted for the Patriot Playhouse. He moved with his family to San Diego, California and later to Los Angeles, where he took classes at the Stella Adler Conservatory and co-founded the Orpheus Theatre Company.^[2] With the theater company, he wrote, directed, and starred in a number of plays. He also spent close to a decade working as a bartender.^[11]