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.
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?
A Harvard alumnus in flagrante delicto? Veritas? Looking back, sex scandals are actually a long-running Harvard tradition. Grads (and undergrads) have been caught with their pants down since at least the 18th century.