Rosario Dawson had to go some intensive song and dance training to star in the film adaptation of Rent, but a lot of her performance in the musical was taken from real-life experience. The actor had an upper hand in playing Mimi Marquez, who lives in elegant squalor on New York's Lower East Side. Similar to someone else she knows. My mom could have been Mimi, Dawson has said. She was a young woman who was struggling and she moved into a building with no heat or water or electricity. That's where Dawson was raised for much of her life, in an apartment with a big hole in the floor and plastic rather than glass in the windows. The actor has gone on to say it was better than living in the railroad apartment with the slumlord down the street, with Dawson's singer-songwriter mother Isabel and construction worker step-dad Greg turning the abandoned building they called home into something resembling a real flat, renovating it and installing plumbing and wiring themselves.