Andrew Garfield — actor with roots in the Russian Empire
Andrew Russell Garfield was born in Los Angeles on 20 August 1983 to Richard Garfield, a Californian whose parents were English, and Lynn Hillman, from Essex. When he was three the family moved to England, and he grew up in Epsom, Surrey. He is Jewish on his father's side and has described himself as a Jewish artist. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his father's father.
According to Wikipedia, his paternal grandparents came from Jewish immigrant families who settled in London from Poland, Russia and Romania, and the surname was originally Garfinkel. In 2025, in an episode of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?, he traced the line further. His grandfather, Samuel Garfinkel, was born in 1909 in Kielce, in southern Poland, then the capital of a governorate of Congress Poland within the Russian Empire. Samuel's parents, Ludwig Harry Garfinkel and Sara Cooper, originally Kupcyk, emigrated with him to the East End of London soon after his birth. In Kielce a genealogist showed him a tree of Ludwig's siblings and their parents, and the spelling Garfinkiel. Relatives who stayed in Kielce died in the Holocaust.
His parents ran a small interior-design business. He trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London and began on the British stage; his television role in Boy A (2007) won him a BAFTA TV Award. He became internationally known as Eduardo Saverin in David Fincher's The Social Network (2010) and played Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and its sequel, returning to the part in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021).
He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge (2016) and for Lin-Manuel Miranda's tick, tick... BOOM! (2021), in which he played the Jewish composer Jonathan Larson and for which he won a Golden Globe. On Broadway he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 2018 for Prior Walter in Angels in America. In 2022 Time named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world.
"Grandfather Samuel Garfinkel was born in Kielce in 1909; his parents Ludwig Harry Garfinkel and Sara Kupcyk emigrated with him to the East End of London shortly afterwards."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kielce, Kielce Governorate, Congress Poland (now Poland)
His father's father, Samuel Garfinkel, was born in 1909 in Kielce, then in Congress Poland under the Russian Empire, and was taken to London's East End as an infant; other branches of the family came from Russia and Romania.
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Kielce, Kielce Governorate, Congress Poland (now Poland). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.