Mila Kunis
Mila Kunis was born in Chernivtsi, in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union. Her family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1991, when Kunis was seven. Kunis is Jewish and her family (including her grandparents) relocated to the United States; according to Kunis for “Freedom”. Kunis sees the former Soviet Union as “a country that obviously did not want Jewish people”, and she has stated “When I was in school you would still see anti-Semitic signs”. Although according to Kunis she herself had “a perfectly fine time in Russia”. Her mother, Elvira, is a physics teacher and drug store manager, and her father, Mark Kunis, is a mechanical engineer and cab company executive. She has an older brother, Michael.
Kunis has stated that a lottery system allowed her family to make the move: “It took about five years. If you got chosen the first time around, you went to Moscow, where there was another lottery, and you maybe got chosen again. Then you could come to the States.” On her second day in Los Angeles, she was enrolled at Rosewood Elementary School not knowing a word of English. “I blocked out second grade,” she says. “I don’t remember, but my mom tells me that I came home and cried every day. I wasn’t that traumatized. It was just a shock.” Kunis added: “I didn’t understand the culture. I didn’t understand the people. I didn’t understand the language. My first sentence of my essay to get into college was like, ‘Imagine being blind and deaf at age seven.’ And that’s kind of what it felt like moving to the States.”
Despite reports to the contrary, Kunis did not learn English from watching The Price Is Right. In Los Angeles, she attended Hubert Howe Bancroft Middle School. She was mostly taught by an on-set tutor for her high school years while filming That ’70s Show. When not on the set, she attended Fairfax High School, where she graduated in 2001. She briefly attended UCLA and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Score: 9.1|10
