Amanda Leigh “Mandy” Moore was born in Nashua, New Hampshire, on April 10, 1984. Her parents are to Stacy (Friedman), a former news reporter, and Don Moore, an airline pilot. During her childhood, when she was around six weeks old, her family moved to Orlando, Florida, where she was raised. She has Russian Jewish (from her maternal grandfather), English, Scottish, and Irish, ancestry.

After seeing the musical Oklahoma!, she decided that she wanted to pursue a career in singing. As a child, she performed the National Anthem at several athletic events around her hometown of Orlando, Florida, and became known as the “National Anthem girl”. Aged 14, while she was recording in a studio in Orlando, a Fed-Ex worker who happened to be passing through heard her. He happened to know someone at Sony as well. Moore worked on cutting a demo and shortly thereafter signed a record deal with Sony 550 Music. At 15, her first record So Real was released.

You can read more about Mandy’s career here.