Ansel Elgort

Ansel Elgort (born March 14, 1994) is an American actor and singer. He began his acting career with a supporting role in the horror film Carrie (2013). He gained wider recognition for starring as a teenage cancer patient in the romantic drama film The Fault in Our Stars (2014) and for his supporting role in The Divergent Series (2014–2016).

In 2017, Elgort played the title character in Edgar Wright's action thriller Baby Driver, for which he received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. After starring in Steven Spielberg's musical film West Side Story (2021), he portrayed Jake Adelstein in the crime series Tokyo Vice from 2022 to 2024.

Early life and background

Ansel Elgort was born in New York City on March 14, 1994. His parents are Arthur Elgort, a fashion photographer who has worked extensively for Vogue magazine and Grethe Barrett Holby, an opera director. Elgort's father named him after prominent nature photographer Ansel Adams (1902–1984). Ansel is of Russian Jewish descent on his father's side, and of Norwegian ancestry on his mother's. Elgort's Norwegian maternal grandmother, Aase-Grethe, was in the Norwegian resistance during World War II and saved Norwegian Jewish children by moving them into neutral Sweden; because of these activities, she was imprisoned in a concentration camp.

Elgort has two older siblings: sister Sophie Elgort, a fashion photographer, and brother Warren Elgort, a cinematographer. He is a cousin of comedian Sam Morril, who is the son of his paternal uncle. At age nine, Elgort auditioned for the School of American Ballet, and studied there for five years.