Editing Melvyn Douglas (section)

==Early life==
Douglas was born in [[Macon, Georgia]], the son of Lena Priscilla ([[married and maiden names|née]] Shackelford) and [[Edouard Gregory Hesselberg]], a [[Pianist#Classical|concert pianist]] and [[composer]]. His father was a Jewish [[emigration|emigrant]] from [[Riga]], Latvia, then part of the [[Russian Empire]]. His mother, a native of [[Tennessee]], was Protestant and a [[The Mayflower Society|''Mayflower'' descendant]].<ref name=NYTimes>{{cite news| url=https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE4DD1E31F93BA25752C0A961948260 | work=The New York Times | title=He Almost Made Garbo Laugh | first1=Hugh | last1=Nissenson | date=January 18, 1987 | access-date=May 12, 2010}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~battle/celeb/mdouglas.htm|title=1|work=ancestry.com|access-date=16 August 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150212184836/http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~battle/celeb/mdouglas.htm|archive-date=12 February 2015|url-status=dead}}</ref>

Douglas, in his [[autobiography]], ''See You at the Movies'' (1987), wrote that he was unaware of his Jewish background until later in his youth: "I did not learn about the non-Christian part of my heritage until my early teens."  His parents preferred to hide his Jewish heritage. His aunts, on his father's side, told him "the truth" when he was 14. He wrote that he "admired them unstintingly"; they in turn, treated him like a son.<ref name=NYTimes/>

Though his father, a prominent concert pianist, taught music at a succession of colleges in the U.S. and Canada, Douglas never graduated from high school. He took the surname of his maternal grandmother and became known as Melvyn Douglas.{{Citation needed |date=July 2024}}