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Reese Witherspoon was born in New Orleans and then lived for a few years in what was then West Germany, where her father, \u2014 a surgeon with the U.S. Air Force \u2014 was stationed. Her family then moved to Nashville, where her mother worked as a registered nurse and also taught nursing at Vanderbilt University. Reese took a different path, modeling and appearing in commercials as a child before making her feature film debut in 1991’s “The\u00a0Man in the Moon.” She starred in “Pleasantville” seven years later, then hit it big with her performance as Elle\u00a0Woods in “Legally Blonde” in 2001. The following year, she told Vanity Fair<\/a> that she had plotted her life as an actor for years. After filming a flower shop commercial for some family friends, “I came home and told my mother I wanted to be an actress,” she said.<\/p>\n “My parents were always incredibly supportive,” Witherspoon added, with the caveat that “they thought it was a hobby for the first four years.” Despite solid guidance from her family and others close to her, she did receive one piece of advice that was and is not only offensive, but counterintuitive for Witherspoon.In September 2025, she told the\u00a0New\u00a0York Times<\/a> that, when she was younger, “I was always being told by people in the industry: ‘Don’t play a mom. It’ll make you seem old.'” She countered that she already was a mom at age 23, but “that was a big part of when I was in my 20s and 30s: Don’t play a mom. No men will desire you, or nobody will want to go see that movie because nobody wants to see a movie about a mom.” The idea that women who have children are undesirable is borderline absurd, and it’s hard to imagine anyone telling George\u00a0Clooney or Tom Cruise not to take any parts as fathers.<\/p>\n