Background and career
Chelsea Joy Handler (born February 25, 1975) is an American stand-up comedian, actress, writer, television host, and producer. She hosted the late-night talk show Chelsea Lately on the E! network from 2007 to 2014 and released a documentary series, Chelsea Does, on Netflix in January 2016. From 2016 to 2017, Handler hosted the talk show Chelsea on Netflix.
Handler was born in Livingston, New Jersey, the youngest of six children of Rita (née Stoecker), a homemaker, and Seymour Handler, a used-car dealer. Her American father was an Ashkenazi Jew; her German mother, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1958, was a Mormon. Commenting on her religious upbringing, Handler said: "I grew up as a Jew and a Mormon ... I chose Jewish obviously. Mormonism is so ridiculous. But I related to ... that conflict of religion for both parents." Handler was raised in Reform Judaism, and had a Bat Mitzvah. In 2013, as an adult, she discovered that her maternal grandfather served in the German army during World War II, on the TLC series Who Do You Think You Are?.
She summered on Martha's Vineyard, where her parents owned a house. She attended Livingston High School, where she was a reluctant student who objected to the school's "student-teacher-asshole ratio".
Handler has two sisters and three brothers; her eldest brother Chet died when he was 22 in a hiking accident in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.She was nine years old at the time. At age 19, she moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles, where she lived in her aunt's home in Bel Air, and pursued acting while working as a waitress to support herself. At 21, Handler decided to pursue stand-up comedy after telling her story about being arrested for driving under the influence to a class of other offenders, who found it funny.
Her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1989 and battled the disease for over 15 years before dying of it in 2006.
