Once upon a time, America’s oldest university dispatched its graduates to the well-known worlds of the East Coast: Wall Street and Washington, law, medicine, and journalism. Then, nearly a century ago, a few risk-taking outsiders, iconoclasts, and eccentrics ventured west to the unsettling new frontier of the movies. Today, Harvard and Hollywood are inseparable. From William Randolph Hearst to Natalie Portman, here is a map to Harvard’s stars.
The Harvard-meets-Hollywood lifestyle: where to live, where to go to get away, how to get there in style, and the clothes and jewelry that will guarantee you look the part.
From Conan O'Brien to Natalie Portman to Homer Simpson, Harvardians have painted Tinseltown red. On the pages that follow, meet the actors, writers, directors, and dealmakers who have brought 02138 to 90210.
Harvard’s presence in Hollywood is nearly as old as Tinseltown itself, yet the uneasy alliance between the country’s most prestigious academic institution and the nexus of mass entertainment is fraught with a singular tension: Can a highbrow university and a pop culture world just get along?