A-list celebrities who were homeless before they made it big

Numerous celebrities didn’t have a place to call home before reaching worldwide fame and a life of luxury. 

With the lavish lives of today’s biggest celebs, it’s hard to imagine them living any differently. 

There are many A-listers who were homeless at some point in their lives before getting their big break. Below are a few of these stars who have publicly spoken about being homeless before finding massive success.

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1. Jim Carrey
2. Tiffany Haddish
3. Sylvester Stallone
4. Jennifer Lopez
5. Chris Pratt
6. Steve Harvey
7. Kelsey Grammer
8. Halle Berry
9. Shania Twain
10. Hilary Swank
11. Kelly Clarkson

1. Jim Carrey

Before Jim Carrey became an actor earning millions of dollars for each film he stars in, he was just a kid forced to grow up quickly when his father lost his job. 

“When my father lost his job, I was pissed,” Carrey said in a 2020 interview with Howard Stern. 

His father’s job loss forced the family into homelessness. 

Before Jim Carrey’s movie career took off, he and his family were homeless. (BBC Films)

“One time, for a while, we pitched a tent on my sister’s lawn in the country,” Carrey said during the interview. “For a while, we went to campsites around Ontario, and we’d use the facilities there.”

When he was 15 years old, Carrey and the rest of his family worked as janitors and security guards to help make ends meet. 

Stern proclaimed that Carry’s story was a sad one, but the comedic actor didn’t agree. 

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“I don’t think so,” Carrey said, adding that he has “a very positive attitude about those sort of things.”

2. Tiffany Haddish 

Now, Tiffany Haddish is a famous comedian, but prior to this, she lived in a car, homeless shelters, showered at gyms and even crashed weddings for food and drinks. 

In a June 2024 interview on “The Howard Stern Show,” Haddish was asked about her time being homeless. Haddish shared that she was homeless three times in her life. 

“I think the lesson in that was to not be afraid to ask for help,” Haddish said, sharing that she lived in her car and also stayed in a homeless shelter “a few times.” 

Tiffany Haddish spent nights in homeless shelters before becoming famous. (Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for SiriusXM)

She even crashed weddings while she was homeless to eat and enjoy a few drinks. 

“I’ve crashed weddings before, given a speech and didn’t know anybody there,” Haddish told People in July 2023. “That’s when I was homeless and hungry.”

“I would have two or three drinks, and then I would grab the microphone and be like, ‘I just want to say that you are the most beautiful couple,’” she said. “Everybody would be looking at me like, ‘Who is this Black girl at our wedding?’”

During this difficult time in her life, Kevin Hart was someone who helped her get her footing in the entertainment space.

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In an interview on SiriusXM’s “This Life of Mine with James Corden” in May 2024, Haddish highlighted her friendship with Hart and the financial help he provided her.  

“We were doing these sketch shows at the Laugh Factory and Kevin was coming up there. It was like every Wednesday night, I would show up late. I didn’t want nobody to see my car,” Haddish said on the show. 

“I would park a little further away, or I would pull up and let the valet take the car, but I would pull up late so nobody would see it. One day, I pulled up and Kevin pulled up just in front of me, and I was like, ‘Damn. Maybe I should pull up,’ and he’s like looking at me. He’s like, ‘Haddish, what’s all this stuff in your car? What’s going on? You homeless or something?’ I’m like, ‘Ah, I’m just in between houses right now,'” Haddish continued. 

“I finally told him what was up, and he’s like, ‘You’re a pretty girl. You shouldn’t be living in your car. This [is] dangerous,'” Haddish added. 

Hart then gave Haddish $300 and provided advice on how to build her career. 

“He’s like, ‘Get yourself a place to stay and then make a list of goals and start doing something towards those goals every day. Make a list. What you wanna do? Where do you wanna be? What are you trying to do here?,’” Haddish recalled. 

Eventually, Haddish earned her breakout role in the 2017 comedy “Girls Trip.” 

3. Sylvester Stallone

Before displaying Rocky Balboa’s comeback story on the big screen, actor Sylvester Stallone experienced a real-life comeback story of his own. 

During a 2015 press interview with Kjersti Flaa ahead of the “Creed” release, Stallone talked about the struggles he endured early in his career. 

“In New York I used to make $39 a week, and this is in 1972. That’s not much,” Stallone shared. 

Sylvester Stallone struck gold with “Rocky,” but before that, he was sleeping wherever he could find space. (Elisabetta Villa)

“I had this one coat. That coat literally was my house,” he said. “I would sleep at the bus station, Port Authority bus station or outside the post office in the dead of winter, and boy, it was cold,” Stallone explained. 

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The “Rocky” franchise, which Stallone penned and starred in, put him on the map and got him to millionaire status.

4. Jennifer Lopez

Jennifer Lopez is a global superstar for her work on stage as a pop singer and on screen, too.

Disagreements between Lopez and her mom left her out on the streets of the Bronx. 

“My mom and I butted heads,” she told W Magazine in 2013. “I didn’t want to go to college. I wanted to try dance full time. So, she and I had a break. I started sleeping on the sofa in the dance studio. I was homeless, but I told her, ‘This is what I have to do.'”

Jennifer Lopez, now a celebrity known around the world, had a rough start breaking into the business. (Hector Vivas)

After just a few months, her career started to take off.

“A few months later, I landed a job dancing in Europe,” she said. “When I got back, I booked ‘In Living Color.’ I became a Fly Girl and moved to L.A. It all happened in a year.”

To date, Lopez has created a lot of buzz in Hollywood with her hit songs like “On the Floor” and “Let’s Get Loud,” movie roles in films such as “Second Act” and “Hustlers,” plus her high-profile marriages with men including Marc Anthony and current spouse Ben Affleck. 

5. Chris Pratt

Chris Pratt, the Marvel star, had many different jobs before becoming the famous actor he is today. 

Pratt was also a stripper when he was 19 years old. 

“I was always a very much naked person. I loved to always get naked. I was very free, so I thought, I may as well get paid,” he told Buzzfeed in 2013.

Then one of his friends invited him to live in Hawaii, and Pratt took the offer. During his time in Hawaii, he lived on the beach. 

“I had a friend who was like, ‘Dude, you’ve got to come out here,’” Pratt told Entertainment Weekly. “We set up camp on the beach and lived the dream.”

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Chris Pratt spent time in Hawaii before he became an actor. (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)

“It’s a pretty awesome place to be homeless,” he told The Independent in 2014. “We just drank and smoked weed and worked minimal hours, just enough to cover gas, food and fishing supplies.”

While living in Hawaii, he was a waiter at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, where he would eventually be discovered. 

One day, he waited on actress Rae Dawn Chong, who cast him in her horror-comedy short “Cursed Part 3.”

Since then, Pratt has been a star of many films and TV shows, including “Parks and Recreation,” the “Jurassic World” franchise and the Marvel franchise as Peter Quill, also known as Star-Lord. 

6. Steve Harvey

Steve Harvey was homeless for three years prior to becoming a popular game and talk show host. 

“One or two gigs fell through, and suddenly I was homeless,” Harvey told People in 2013. 

Steve Harvey was homeless for years before making it big in Hollywood. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

He lived out of his 1976 Ford Tempo, using hotel, gas station and swimming pool showers as a place to freshen up, according to the outlet.

“It was so disheartening,” Harvey said. “A week is really the maximum you can do. This was three years. It was rock bottom. But even in my darkest days I had faith it would turn around.”

7. Kelsey Grammer

In a 2019 episode of “In Depth with Graham Bensinger,” Kelsey Grammer spoke about being homeless while attending the Juilliard School on a scholarship. 

The summer before heading off to school, Grammer took two jobs to save up enough money to get him through the year. 

Kelsey Grammer spent some warm nights sleeping in a New York City park during his college years. (Donald Kravitz/Getty Images)

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He worked at a hotel at night and did work on a construction site during the day. Grammer said he made $700 by the end of the summer.

For a few weeks, while the weather was still warm, Grammer said he slept in the park. 

“I could sneak behind a certain bush and cover myself with newspaper, and I was fine,” Grammer said in the interview, adding that he showered at Juilliard.

Today, Grammer is known for playing Dr. Frasier Crane in “Cheers” and the spin-off show “Frasier.” 

8. Halle Berry

Halle Berry spent time living in a homeless shelter early on in her career. 

Upon getting to New York City, Berry quickly ran out of funds to get her by. 

Halle Berry lived in a homeless shelter before becoming famous. (Denise Truscello/Getty Images for Pendulum)

“I mean three months later, I was out of my cash,” Berry said, per People in 2017. “I called my mother and asked her to send me some money, and she said no, and that subsequently led to a year of not speaking to her because I was so upset that she wouldn’t help me.”

“But again, that’s probably one of the best things she did for me,” Berry added. “She said ‘If you want to be there, then you be there, you work it out,’ and I had to work it out,” the actress added. 

9. Shania Twain

Shania Twain didn’t have an easy road to becoming the country artist she is today. 

In her 2011 memoir, “From This Moment On,” Twain wrote about spending time in a homeless shelter with her mother and siblings early in her life. 

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Shania Twain opened up about her childhood in the 2011 memoir “From This Moment On.” (Lester Cohen/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)

“Mom got out of the car to use a pay phone while we sat and waited in the car, returning a few minutes later with a piece of paper on which she’d scribbled the address of a homeless shelter. That night, we slept in a crowded, sweltering place on cot-like beds spread out along the walls of a series of spacious, open rooms designed for large groups,” Twain wrote in her memoir, per Time.

Twain went on to be a five-time Grammy winner. 

10. Hilary Swank

Before becoming famous, Hilary Swank and her mother lived out of their car. 

“In L.A., my mother and I first lived in her Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme on quiet residential streets,” she said during a February 2024 interview with the Wall Street Journal. “When we weren’t sleeping in the car, we stayed at the house of a new friend my age whose family had just moved out and were trying to sell their home. We slept on an air mattress.”

Hilary Swank says before moving to Los Angeles, she lived in a trailer park in Bellingham, Washington. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)

Swank earned her first leading role in the 1992 film “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The actress went on to win two Oscars for the movies “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby.”

11. Kelly Clarkson

After Kelly Clarkson won “American Idol” in 2002, her whole life changed, but the singer surely came from humble beginnings. 

On a December 2023 episode of her own talk show, she spoke about briefly living in her car before auditioning for the singing competition show. 

Before auditioning for “American Idol,” Kelly Clarkson spent a short time living in her car. (Weiss Eubanks/SYNDICATION via Getty Images)

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“I actually moved out to L.A. with some random person I did not know,” Clarkson told Kevin Bacon, who was a guest on her show. She then revealed that the living arrangement didn’t last long as the house caught fire. 

“It burned down, so yeah,” she said. “Then I slept in my car for a few days and then tried out for a show called ‘American Idol,’ so it all worked out.”