Early Life And Education
McKellar was born in La Jolla, California. She moved with her family to Los Angeles when she was eight. Her mother Mahaila McKellar was a homemaker her father Christopher McKellar is a real estate developer her younger sister Crystal is a lawyer. She is of paternal Scottish, French, German, Spanish, and Dutch descent and her mother is of Portuguese origin via the Azores and Madeira islands.
McKellar studied at the University of California, Los Angeles where she was a member of the Alpha Delta Pi sorority and earned a Bachelor of Science degree summa cum laude in Mathematics in 1998. As an undergraduate, she coauthored a scientific paper with Professor Lincoln Chayes and fellow student Brandy Winn titled “Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagneticAshkinTeller models on Z 2 ^} .” Their results are termed the “ChayesMcKellarWinn theorem”. Later, when Chayes was asked to comment about the mathematical abilities of his student coauthors, he was quoted in The New York Times, “I thought that the two were really, really first-rate.” For her past collaborative work on research papers, McKellar is currently assigned the Erds number four, and her ErdsBacon number is six.
The Wonder Years And Early Acting Career
At age seven, McKellar enrolled in weekend acting classes for children at the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles. In her teens, she landed a prominent role in The Wonder Years, an American television comedy-drama that ran for six seasons on ABC, from 1988 to 1993. She played Gwendolyn “Winnie” Cooper, the main love interest of Kevin Arnold on the show. Her first kiss was with Fred Savage in an episode of The Wonder Years. She later said, “My first kiss was a pretty nerve-wracking experience! But we never kissed off screen, and pretty quickly our feelings turned into brother/sister, and stayed that way.”