Graduating From School of Hard Knocks
Liz Murray, whose traumatic but inspiring life is depicted in the new Lifetime movie “Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story,” endured a childhood that could have been lifted from the pages of a Charles Dickens novel.
And like such Dickens’ heroes as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickelby and David Copperfield, Murray has overcome every adversity in her way. She was raised in dire poverty by loving but drug-addicted parents. She rarely made it to school, but when she did she excelled in her classes. At 15, she was living on the streets in the Bronx in New York after her mother, who was also schizophrenic and legally blind, died of AIDS and her father moved to a shelter. Instead of wallowing in self-pity or turning to drugs like her parents, Murray decided to make a change in her life. She went back to high school and earned her diploma in just two years, while still homeless. She then won a New York Times scholarship for needy students and enrolled at Harvard.
Thora Birch, who plays Murray, got to spend a few days with her before production began last fall. Birch says their time together was invaluable.
“She is very self-aware and contained,” Birch says. “She’s a wonderful mixture of warmth but at the same time there is something a little guarded about her. She speaks with such self-possession. Her lack of self-pity and unwillingness to place blame on the exact sources of her tribulations is something I find to be highly commendable.”
Murray, 22, says when she was young she believed everyone grew up in a household like hers.
“It’s really all relative,” she says. “It only occurred to me when I went to school that I saw the differences. I saw the kids with the clean clothing and no lice in their hair. I visited their homes and I saw a fridge full of food and I knew something was off. I got the idea I didn’t live the way other kids lived.”
As difficult as her home situation was, she never felt unloved and was not bitter toward her parents. “If you have any complicated situation, any situation fraught with adversity and you put love in it, there are some great lessons to learn from that,” Murray says. “There is no good reason at all to be angry. It shouldn’t be your first impulse when things don’t go right. Life doesn’t work on the system of checks and balances. Things happen randomly and you try to control it as best you can and you cope as you go along.”
Executive producer Tom Patricia made sure Murray was involved in the film, which premieres Monday night on Lifetime. “Just after I optioned the rights, Ronni Kern, the writer, and I went to New York to visit Liz and stayed with her a few days and walked around to all the places she was in and out of: the bus stops, the subways and neighborhoods. We had long, long dinners where Liz would talk about her mother and father and family and friends. Liz read every draft of the screenplay and gave us notes. We wanted to get it right.”
Murray left Harvard in January, midway through her sophomore year. “It really wasn’t a good fit,” she says, adding that there were personal reasons for her departure that she didn’t want to discuss. She also wanted to be with her father, who has AIDS and hepatitis C. “His health has been a little more shaky lately,” she says. “We recently found out he has cirrhosis, so he has been undergoing chemotherapy, and I have been taking him to treatments and sticking by him.”
She’s looking at colleges in New York with an eye to studying film.
“I am probably going to stick by my dad for the year and by this time next year, I’ll probably be back in school,” Murray says. Meanwhile, she’s revising her autobiography, scheduled for publication early next year, and travels around the country to give talks about her life because she feels it’s her responsibility to do so. “I got very lucky at some point, and I try to give all that back.”
“Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story” can be seen Monday at 9 p.m. on Lifetime. The network has rated it TV-PG LV (may be unsuitable for small children with advisories for course language and violence).
Cover photograph by Lifetime Television.
