Ansel Elgort was born March 14, 1994 and is an American actor, singer, and DJ (under the name Ansølo). He began his acting career with a supporting role in the horror film Carrie (2013).
Elgort gained wider recognition for starring as a cancer patient in the romantic teen drama The Fault in Our Stars (2014) and for his role in The Divergent Series franchise. In 2017, he played the title character in Edgar Wright’s action thriller Baby Driver. As a singer, he has released the singles “Thief” (2017) and “Supernova” (2018).
He was born in Manhattan. His parents are Arthur Elgort, a fashion photographer who has worked extensively for Vogue for over thirty years, and Grethe Barrett Holby, an opera director. Elgort’s father is of Russian Jewish descent, and his mother is of Norwegian, English, and German ancestry.
His 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 is named after photographer Ansel Adams.
The third of three children, he has two older siblings: sister Sophie Elgort (born 1986), a fashion photographer, and brother Warren Elgort (born 1989), a cinematographer. At the age of nine, his mother took him to try out for School of American Ballet. Elgort went on to study there for 5 years.
He attended The Professional Performing Arts School, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School and Stagedoor Manor summer camp. Elgort started taking acting classes at the age of twelve and at LaGuardia, where he performed in a rendition of Hairspray with schoolmate Kyle Jean-Baptiste and starred in the school’s productions of Guys and Dolls.
Under the name Ansolo, Elgort created a SoundCloud account to publish electronic dance music, and he has remixed songs such as “Born to Die” by Lana del Rey. In a livestream in February 2014 he stated he had signed a record deal with Tom Staar’s new label Staar Traxx and Steve Angello Size Records.
He is a skateboarder and an avid sportsman, often seen playing pickup basketball. As a hobby, he also took to miniature painting, displaying some of his work.
