Paris Whitney Hilton (born February 17, 1981) is an American celebrity, socialite, model, actress and recording artist. She is an heiress to a share of both the Hilton Hotel fortune and the real estate fortune of her father Richard Hilton.
Hilton rose to fame when an amateur sex video depicting her was leaked onto the Internet in late 2003. The release of the tape, later titled 1 Night in Paris (2004), attracted worldwide publicity and contributed to the success of Hilton's Fox reality series The Simple Life. As an actress, she has appeared in several minor roles, most notably in the horror film House of Wax (2005), and in 2006, she released the eponymous album Paris. Hilton has since garnered greater notoriety as a result of several legal incidents, the repercussions of which have been the subject of intense media attention, public controversy and parody.
Born in New York City, New York, Hilton is the oldest of four children of Richard and Kathy Hilton. Her younger sister is Nicky Hilton, and her younger brothers are Barron Hilton II, and Conrad Hilton III. On the maternal side of her family, Hilton is a niece of two child stars of the 1970s, Kim Richards and Kyle Richards. By marriage, she also is related to Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elizabeth Taylor. Her paternal grandparents are hotel chairman Barron Hilton, and his wife, the former Marilyn Hawley; Hilton's paternal great-grandparents were Hilton Hotels founder Conrad Hilton and his first wife, Mary Barron. When Conrad Hilton died in 1979, he left nothing in his will to his children or other descendants. Barron Hilton contested this decision and prevailed in court in 1988. The value of Paris's inheritance has been variously estimated at between $30 and $50 million.
Hilton moved between several exclusive homes in her youth, including a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan, Beverly Hills, and the Hamptons. She attended her freshman year of high school in Rancho Mirage, California at the Marywood-Palm Valley School and her sophomore and junior years of high school at the Dwight School in New York, but dropped out, and eventually earned a GED. Wikipedia |
