Scotland I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father’s case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward…

My Childhood I was born on December 30, 1930 in Ningbo, a city on the east coast of China with a rich culture and over seven thousand years of history. Although it was a tumultuous age in China when I was a child, I was lucky enough to have completed a good education from primary…

Before any of the present fuss I was, of course, born; and that turned out to be slightly complicated – not in an obstetrical sense, but in a political one. Several years before the event, an international border was created between my parents’ rural town and the nearby city where maternity facilities were available at…

I was born in March 1938 in the small town of Carcassonne in the south of France. Later, and until I was two years old, I lived in Toulouse, another city in Southern France, where my parents were high school teachers, my father in physics and my mother in economics. But war loomed on the…

My Educational Background I was born and raised in Troyes, a town located east of Paris and north of Burgundy. Troyes was the capital of Champagne in the middle ages; its fairs hosted trade between Northern Italian cities and Flanders among others; Troyes has accordingly preserved a rich cultural heritage. My father, who passed away…

I was born in New York City, but grew up across the Hudson River in Alpine, New Jersey. With fewer than a thousand residents, Alpine was too small to have its own secondary schools, so I attended junior high and high school in the town of Tenafly, three miles down the road. At Tenafly High,…

Ethnically, I come from a mixed family. My father was the son of Jewish immigrants who left Russia shortly after the turn of the century, and my mother was the daughter of a Lutheran minister whose parents were from what is now Slovakia. Mostly, however, I grew up in a medical family. My father’s father…

My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800’s. One of my great grandfathers had…

My father, Harry Warren Anderson, was a professor of plant pathology at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where I was brought up from 1923 to 1940. Although raised on the farm – my grandfather was an unsuccessful fundamentalist preacher turned farmer – my father and his brother both became professors. My mother’s father was…

In addition to playwright, Dario Fo is also director, stage and costume designer, and on occasion he even composes the music for his plays. France Rame, his leading actress, has assisted in and contributed to the writing of many of the plays they have produced in their 45 years of theatre together. She has also…