Gabrielle Mary Antonia Hoffmann (born January 8, 1982) is an American actress. She initially found success as a child actress, appearing in Field of Dreams, Uncle Buck, and Sleepless in Seattle, and then later as a teenager with Now and Then, Volcano, All I Wanna Do, and 200 Cigarettes.
After a hiatus, Hoffmann returned to film acting in 2007, appearing in various independent projects that garnered critical acclaim. This has been described as a career "resurgence", due to her roles in Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus with Michael Cera, Wild with Reese Witherspoon, and her leading role in C'mon C'mon alongside Joaquin Phoenix. On television, she starred as Ali Pfefferman in Transparent (2014–2019) and appeared as Caroline Sackler in Girls (2014–2017), which garnered her three Primetime Emmy Award nominations.
Early life
Hoffmann was born in New York City. Her mother Viva (born Janet Susan Mary Hoffmann) is an actress, writer and former Warhol superstar, and her father, Anthony Herrera, was a soap opera actor best known for his role as James Stenbeck in As the World Turns. Viva and Herrera were estranged shortly after Hoffmann's birth; she was raised by her mother at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Her father did not have a significant presence in her life. Hoffmann's birth is documented in Pat Hackett's The Andy Warhol Diaries. An entry dated January 10, 1982, two days after Hoffmann was born, says a friend telephoned Warhol and told him they were going to the Chelsea Hotel to see Viva and her new baby.
Hoffmann's mother, the daughter of an attorney, was raised in a conservative and devoutly Catholic family in New York State. Viva was previously married to director Michel Auder in 1969, by which union Gaby Hoffmann has an elder half-sister, Alexandra "Alex" Auder, who teaches yoga in New York City. Herrera was raised in Wiggins, Mississippi by his maternal grandparents; his own father, Gaby's paternal grandfather, was of French and Spanish descent. Herrera died in 2011 from cancer.
Hoffmann attended elementary school in Manhattan at P.S. 3 on Hudson Street in the West Village, then another school in Hell's Kitchen. After she moved to Los Angeles in 1994, she attended the Buckley School, before finally graduating from Calabasas High School in 1999.
Life at the Chelsea Hotel
Until July 1993, Hoffmann lived in Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel, which Hoffmann later said she enjoyed. According to Hoffmann, she and her best friend Talya Shomron roller-skated in the hallways, spied on the drug dealer across the hall, and persuaded the bellman to go to the neighborhood delicatessen at night to fetch them ice cream.
Hoffmann recalled, "I grew up in downtown New York in the '80s. I have a friend who grew up with me, and she puts it well. She says, 'If you grew up where we grew up, if you weren't an artist, a drag queen, queer, or a drug addict, then you were the freak.' I grew up in a world where I guess what is considered unusual or abnormal for the rest of America was very much considered the norm." She also reported in an interview that there had been gunfire and a rape at the hotel shortly before they moved out.
Hoffmann and her mother left the Chelsea Hotel after a long-standing dispute with the management that ended in eviction. Regardless, Hoffmann's connection to the hotel had a significant effect on her future. The idea for the 1994 sitcom Someone Like Me originated after Gail Berman (former president of Viacom's Paramount Pictures) read a New York Times article about the hotel which referred to a children's book that Viva and friend Jane Lancellotti wrote, Gaby at the Chelsea (a take on Kay Thompson's 1950s classic Eloise books). Berman became the show's producer.
Adolescence on the West Coast
After leaving the Chelsea when Hoffmann was 12, she and her mother moved to the west coast to a two-bedroom rented house in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, which was badly damaged in the January 17, 1994 Northridge earthquake. While regrouping their living situation, Hoffmann and her mother temporarily lived at The Oceana Suites Hotel in Santa Monica, California.
College and assorted jobs
After she graduated from Calabasas High School in 1999, Hoffmann followed her half-sister Alex's example and entered New York's Bard College to pursue a degree in literature and writing. Around 2001, she temporarily left her acting career to complete her studies and graduated in 2004; her senior thesis was a documentary film.