Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s mother, Jane Gordon, ran for the United States Congress in California during the 1970s for the Peace and Freedom Party; she met Dennis Levitt while she was working as the program guide editor for KPFK-FM.
She was born Jane Denise in 1954 in Los Angeles, California. Her father was an aerospace engineer and her mother was a homemaker. His maternal grandfather, Michael Gordon (1909–1993), was a Hollywood film director. Gordon-Levitt had an older brother, Dan, a photographer and fire spinner who died in 2010 at the age of 36. Gordon-Levitt attended Van Nuys High School and graduated in 1999.
Gordon attended the University of Southern California, where she studied English literature. She met her future husband, Dennis Levitt, while they were students at USC. The couple married in 1977 and had their first child, Joseph, the following year.
Gordon is a stay-at-home mom who has been supportive of her son’s acting career from the beginning. In fact, it was she who encouraged him to pursue acting after he expressed an interest in it when he was just six years old. She has appeared in a few of her son’s films, including 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), in which she played the mother of Heath Ledger’s character, and 500 Days of Summer (2009).
