Thrive: 30 Inspirational Rags-to-Riches Stories

Jon Hamm

Jonathan Daniel "Jon" Hamm was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His father ran a family trucking company and his mother was a secretary. His parents divorced when he was two years old. Jon's mother died of colon cancer when he was ten years old, so he moved in with his grandmother and father. He started acting at an early age, with his first performance as Winnie the Pooh in the first grade.

In high school, Jon was both a drama kid and a jock, playing Judas in Godspell and a middle linebacker on the football team. After graduation, and after turning down several athletic scholarships, Jon attended the University of Texas to study English. However, he dropped out after his father died, due to diabetes and general poor health. He moved back home and lived in the basement of his older half-sister Julie's house, where he fell into a deep depression. At twenty years old, Jon had lost both of his parents. Fighting suicidal thoughts and prescribed Prozac for a month, Jon recovered and graduated from the University of Missouri on a drama scholarship, where he performed in fifteen plays in just two years. After graduation, Jon taught eighth grade acting for some time, as a gesture of repayment for the school's support during his adolescent years.

At twenty-four years old, Jon headed for California with $150 and his Toyota Corolla to pursue an acting career. He moved into a house with four other aspiring actors and took a job as a waiter while attending auditions. Finding acting work was tough for Jon, primarily due to his older appearance. He once said, "If you didn't look eighteen years old, you weren't working. And I didn't look eighteen years old when I was eighteen. I always looked ten years older than I was."

After three years of not landing a single acting role and after being dropped from his agency, Jon took a job as a set dresser on a softcore pornographic film, earning $150 per day. He then made himself a promise. He would give himself five more years. Five years, and if his acting career wasn't going by the time he was thirty years old, he was in the wrong field. At that moment, his entire life changed, and it was like he started working right away. Jon found career-making work portraying a fireman on the drama series Providence. His one-episode contract grew to nineteen, and Jon was finally able to quit waiting tables and pursue acting full-time. He landed minor roles in Clint Eastwood's space adventure Space Cowboys (2000), independent comedy Kissing Jessica Stein (2001) and We Were Soldiers (2002), having turned thirty years old during filming. His career was further bolstered by minor roles in television series, including the recurring role of police inspector Nate Basso on Lifetime's The Division.Jon auditioned, along with more than eighty candidates, for the protagonist character Don Draper in AMC's television series Mad Men. He went through numerous auditions, each time explaining to the casting directors that he had a lot of personal experience to offer, as both Jon and Draper were not raised by parents. Jon also used memories of his father, who was very similar, to portray Draper. He was at the very bottom of everyone's list, but creator Matthew Weiner believed in Jon and fought for him to win the role. He did, and Mad Men premiered on July 19, 2007 with over 1.4 million viewers, catapulting Jon into stardom.