Matthew McConaughey

Matthew David McConaughey was born on November 4, 1969, in Uvalde, Texas. He has Irish heritage, particularly from the County Cavan/County Monaghan area. His mother, Mary Kathleen (née McCabe), a published author and a former kindergarten teacher, was from Trenton, New Jersey. His father, James Donald McConaughey, also had Irish roots. He was born in Mississippi in 1929 and raised in Louisiana where he ran an oil pipe supply business; he played for the Kentucky Wildcats and the Houston Cougars college football teams. Jim was selected by the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League (NFL) in the 27th round of the 1953 NFL draft. He was released before the season began and never played an official league game in the NFL. McConaughey's parents married each other three times, having divorced each other twice. He has two older brothers, Michael and Patrick (who was adopted). Michael, nicknamed "Rooster", is a millionaire who starred in the CNBC docu-series West Texas Investors Club. The family were Methodists. He is a relative of Confederate brigadier general Dandridge McRae. McConaughey moved to Longview, Texas in 1980[5] and later attended Longview High School. In 1988, he went to Australia thinking he would be attending a high school in Sydney. Instead he lived in Warnervale, New South Wales for a year while he went to Gorokan High School (he was a Rotary Youth Exchange student) and worked as an assistant for an attorney and as a bank teller for ANZ. During this time in Australia and for the next 10 years he seriously considered becoming a monk. A friend of his who was a monk told McConaughey that he was not here to be a monk, that he was meant to be "a communicator" and "a storyteller". He attended the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), where he joined the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. He began in the fall of 1989 and graduated in the spring of 1993 with a Bachelor of Science in Radio-Television-Film. His original plan changed as he had wanted to attend Southern Methodist University until one of his brothers told him that private-school tuition would have been a burden on the family's finances. He had planned to attend law school after graduation from college but discovered he did not have any interest in becoming a lawyer.