Vicki Hyman | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

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Andrew McCarthy, Westfield

No, he's not from Chicago's North Shore, no matter how many times you've watched "Pretty In Pink." Former Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy, who now stars on ABC's "The Family" as a suspected child killer set free after his supposed victim turns up alive, grew up in Westfield and attended the Pingry School, where he started acting. "It was a perfectly fine suburban childhood," he told New Jersey Monthly in 2011. "I just felt sort of very lonely at school. I just didn't feel like I belonged there."

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Bryan Singer, West Windsor

Hollywood director and super-producer Bryan Singer ("The Usual Suspects," "The X-Men" films) was born in New York City but was adopted and grew up in West Windsor Township, where he made Super 8 movies and dreamed of being the next George Lucas. He revealed on Instagram last year that he purchased his childhood home. (We checked: $548,888)

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Fran Lebowitz, Morristown

Essayist and New York icon Fran Lebowitz was actually born and raised in Morristown and Morris Township, where she claims she was kicked out of her Episcopalian day school for "unspecified surliness." She wrote about her Jersey childhood last year in the Wall Street Journal: "I was always drawing Pilgrims, and I was very good at it. I even drew them when I wasn't in school. I assumed I'd be called on in an emergency to draw one and I'd be ready. All the things we were taught we believed. I never had a bad word about the United States until I was well into the my teens."

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Lauren Cohan, Cherry Hill

Everyone is always surprised when Lauren Cohan, who stars as Georgia farmgirl turned zombie slayer Maggie in "The Walking Dead," reveals her English accent, but she was actually born in Cherry Hill and lived there until she was 13, when her family moved to England but she still returns to the area once or twice a year. "My Jersey accent is the hardest for me to shake after I leave town," she told Philadelphia Style last year. "And the weirdest part of that is that my Jersey accent sounds like New Yawwwk. I saw a video of a wedding in Jersey I was in not so long ago, and I sound like Meadow Soprano."

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Donald Fagen, Passaic/Kendall Park

Born in Passaic, Steely Dan singer and songwriter Donald Fagen moved to Kendall Park when he was a kid, an experience he does not write of glowingly in his 2015 memoir "Eminent Hipsters," calling the Middlesex County burb "soul-strangling" and "an accursed wasteland that would suck the life out of our heretofore vital family."

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Bill Bellamy, Newark

Comedian and actor Bill Bellamy grew up in Newark and graduated from Rutgers, and he has incorporated the struggles of his hometown into his comedy: "They always talked about downtown Newark like, 'Oh, my God, it's coming back!' But as soon as the white people who work there punch the clock, they are hauling ass out of there. It's like a race to the PATH train. People from Newark are like, 'You don't have to run,' but they're like, 'No, no, we're getting the hell to Morristown.'"

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Michael Landon, Collingswood

He's associated with the frontier ("Bonanza," "Little House on the Prairie"), but actor Michael Landon was born Eugene Orowitz in Forest Hills, Queens, and grew up in Collingswood, where, he said in interviews later, he had difficulty fitting in and was subject to anti-Semitic taunts.

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Patti Smith, Woodbury

Singer-songwriter Patti Smith was born in Chicago but grew up in Woodbury, where she graduated from Deptford Township High School ("interested in painting, folk music, progressive jazz") and attended Glassboro State College (now Rowan University). "It was very rural in South Jersey in the late '50s," she told Philadelphia magazine in 2008. "I gravitated toward art, even as a small child. It was just within me. Although I had a happy childhood, I needed to be where there was more culture available to me."

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Mitch Albom, Oaklyn

Mitch Albom, the Detroit sportswriter famous for "Tuesdays with Morrie" and "Five People You Meet in Heaven," was born in Passaic but grew up in Oaklyn, Camden County: "Outside of my Jersey accent, which I’ve seemed to lost the majority of, I always identify myself with Jersey," he told South Jersey magazine last year. "My life in Detroit is very full now; it’s certainly my adopted home. I’ve lived here for 30 years, and I left New Jersey when I was 16. But you never forget where you’re from."

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Daisy Fuentes, Harrison

Daisy Fuentes, MTV's first Latina veejay, was born in Cuba but left in the early years of Fidel Castro's dictatorship. Her family briefly lived in Spain before moving to Harrison, where she grew up, graduating from Harrison High School (she was homecoming queen) before attending Bergen Community College. "Jersey means everything that's real to me," she told the website HudsonMod in 2012. "There's a real grittiness to New Jersey ... I grew up on the streets of Jersey with a real strong sense of toughness. You become stronger in Jersey and you curse — a lot."

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Roy Scheider, Orange

Roy Scheider, the late actor beloved for "Jaws," was born in East Orange, raised in Orange, graduated from Maplewood's Columbia High School and wrestled for Rutgers. He recalled a childhood burnished at the Irvington cinema, "eating popcorn with my feet propped up on the brass rail, and my eyes glued to the screen. I dreamed, and the movies took me to the South Seas, to all the places I wanted to go."

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Kal Penn, Montclair/Marlboro

"I always like to say that being from New Jersey is like an ethnicity, no matter where you are in the world," actor (and former Obama administration official) Kal Penn told Rolling Stone in 2013. The son of Indian immigrants, the future "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" star was born in Montclair but later moved to Marlboro with his family; he graduated from Freehold Township High School.







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David Copperfield, Metuchen

Born David Kotkin in Metuchen, the young David Cooperfield taught himself magic to combat his own insecurities and by age 12 became a member of the Society of American Magicians. His 1974 Metuchen High School. yearbook entry includes a quote from Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale": "What I was, I am More straining on for plucking back, not following my leash unwillingly."

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James L. Brooks. North Bergen

The Oscar-winning director James L. Brooks, who co-created "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," developed "The Simpsons" and directed countless classic TV sitcoms, had a tough childhood in North Bergen, with an alcoholic father and a mother who worked constantly to make ends meet. "I think it was all about surviving," he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2014.

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Marc Maron, Jersey City

The comedian and podcast host Marc Maron was born in Jersey City but moved with his famliy to New Mexico when he was six.

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Trey Anastasio, Princeton

The jam band Phish is most closely associated with Burlington, Vt., but frontman and guitarist Trey Anastasio grew up in Princeton, though he was born in Fort Worth. He attended Princeton Day School with future songwriting collaborator Tom Marshall. (Anastasio's bandmate Page McConnel was born in Philly but grew up in Basking Ridge and attended Gill St. Bernard's School.) And speaking of Princeton, Blues Traveler frontman John Popper and Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors went to Princeton High School around the same time and knew Anastasio.

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Kevin Spacey, South Orange

A Jersey native, two-time Oscar winner and current "House of Cards" star Kevin Spacey lived in South Orange until he was 4, when his family moved to Southern California.

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Bebe Neuwirth, Princeton

Tony- and Emmy-winning actress and dancer Bebe Neuwirth was born in Newark and raised in Princeton, where her father worked at the Institute of Defense Analyses, a national security think tank. "I got arrested for smoking marijuana when I was 13," she told People magazine in 1991. "But I wasn't extremely wild. I was a bum in school; I didn't do any work. I drove my parents crazy."

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Nathan Lane, Jersey City

The future star of "The Producers" Nathan Lane was born Joe Lane to an alcoholic truck driver and a manic depressive mother in Jersey City. He starred in musicals at St. Peter's Preperatory School before trying his luck in New York, where he changed his name to Nathan (after playing Nathan Detroit at a Jersey supper club in late 1970s) because there was another Joseph Lane in Actors Equity.

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