Her parents divorced when she was eight and Burnett was raised by her grandmother on her mother's side, a feisty old woman who instilled the young girl with values, as well as taking her to the movies up to eight times a week (Burnett's signature ear-tug at the close of her shows was a tribute to "Nanny"). "You might say 'poor' thing when you heard my parents drank and we were on relief," the actor told
Newsday reporter Blake Green in 1999, "but that was the way it was with everyone in that neighborhood. I never had a picture that anything could be different, except in the movies, and I knew that was fantasy."
When Burnett started college, she got a job as an usher at a Warner Brothers-owned movie theater. She was fired after she refused to seat a couple during the last five minutes of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. When Burnett was given her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1975, she asked that it be placed in front of that theater.
Burnett attended UCLA in 1951, originally to pursue a degree in English writing.
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