Lyonne was born in New York City, the daughter of boxing promoter Ivette Buchinger and Aaron Braunstein, a race car driver and radio personality who was distantly related to cartoonist Al Jaffee. Lyonne was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home by parents from Orthodox Jewish backgrounds.
Her mother was born in Paris, France, to Holocaust survivors’ Hungarian-Jewish parents. Lyonne has darkly joked that “my father’s side is Flatbush, and my mother’s side is Auschwitz.” Ella, her grandma, came from a huge family. Lyonne attributes her survival to her blond hair and blue eyes, as well as those of her two sisters and two brothers. Morris Buchinger, Lyonne’s grandfather, ran a watch company in Los Angeles. During the war, he disguised himself as a non-Jew working in a leather business in Budapest. Lyonne grew up in Great Neck, New York, for the first eight years of her life.
Lyonne moved to Israel with her parents and stayed for a year and a half. During her stay in Israel with her family, Lyonne appeared in the 1989 Israeli children’s film April Fool (Hebrew: ), which sparked her passion for acting. Lyonne and her older brother, Adam, returned to America after their parents split. Lyonne returned to New York City and attended the Ramaz Institution, an elite Jewish school where she claimed to be a scholarship student who took honors Talmud studies and read Aramaic. She was expelled from school for selling marijuana. Lyonne grew raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where she felt like an outcast.
Lyonne’s mother relocated the family to Miami, where she attended Miami Country Day School. She dropped out of high school before her senior year to pursue a film degree at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her high school diploma was contingent on completing her first year at Tisch, but she dropped out because she couldn’t afford the cost.
Natasha Lyonne’s husband: Is Natasha Lyonne married?
Natasha has never married and is not currently in a relationship.
