6 Oscar Winning Actors Who Were Born In Surprising Places

In Hollywood, not everyone is who they seem to be.

1. Lupita Nyong'o

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Lupita Nyong'o, star of 12 Years a Slave, made history this year as the first Kenyan to win an academy award. But Nyong'o's parents weren't actually living in Kenya when she was born.

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Instead, Nyong'o's parents were in Mexico at the time, hence her name "Lupita" — a reference to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

2. Natalie Portman

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Natalie Portman took home an Oscar for her role in Black Swan, a film about a dancer in New York. The role was a good fit for Portman who has spent much her life in the Empire State.

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But if you guessed Portman is a U.S. native, you'd be wrong. Instead, she was born in Israel and didn't move to the U.S. until she was 4-years-old.

3. Daniel Day-Lewis

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Daniel Day-Lewis is famous for playing Americans. From an early New York gangster to an oil tycoon to Abraham Lincoln himself, few actors seem as American as Day-Lewis.

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And yet, Day-Lewis isn't American at all. In fact, he was born in London and holds duel English and Irish citizenship. If you caught the Oscars last week, you may even have heard his natural, charmingly-accented voice.

4. Nicole Kidman

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Nicole Kidman is famously Australian. She even starred in a movie called Australia. She won her Oscar after playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours.

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But if you guessed she was born in the land down under, you'd be wrong. Kidman was actually born in Honolulu while her Australian parents had student visas to be in the U.S.

5. Cher

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Cher's long and fabulous career — which includes an Oscar for Moonstruck — would seem to suggest origins in an equally fabulous place. Somewhere perhaps like Las Vegas, Hollywood, or Xanadu?

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In reality, however, Cher was born in El Centro, a small, scorchingly hot agricultural town deep in the California desert.

6. Vivien Leigh

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It's been awhile since Vivien Leigh strolled the red carpet but the British actress walked away with Oscars for roles in two of Hollywoods most iconic films: Gone With the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire. In her day, Leigh was the epitome of Hollywood glamour.

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But in a testament to how much the world has changed, Leigh was actually born in 1913 in Darjeeling, India, while it was still part of the British Empire. He dad was an officer in the British Indian Army. #ageofimperialism