Suzanne Mahoney Grows Up South of San Francisco
She was born Suzanne Marie Mahoney on October 16, 1946, in the small city of San Bruno, California, just south of San Francisco. Her family was Irish-American and solidly working class, the kind of household where a paycheck had to stretch and expectations were set early. Neighbors and classmates later remembered her as talkative and hard to ignore in a room, traits that did not always fit the quiet expectations placed on girls in that era. Nothing about her early circumstances pointed toward Hollywood. What it did produce was a young woman who learned to push against limits placed on her, a habit that would define nearly every major turn in her adult life.