Nationality 1: American

Birthdate: 1963

Though her exact birth date is not provided in online sources that give biographical information, it is believed that playwright and actress Claudia Shear was born about 1963. She is the daughter of a deputy chief of the New York City Fire Department and an Italian mother who worked for a cosmetics company. Shear's father left her mother soon after Shear was born. Shear grew up in Brooklyn, where she hung out with a crowd of tough girls: “We broke bottles and made out in alleyways and hid our cigarettes in bushes near our houses only to retrieve them the next day, crushing leaves between our fingers to mask the smell of smoke,” she wrote in Blown Sideways Through Life (1995). When she was twelve she got her first job, working in a hardware store in the Bronx, New York, in the 1970s. She also...