Thelma Thayer Gibson was born on November 2, 1923 in Boston, Massachusets, to Manual Flanders Gibson and Florence Emsralda Fogg. Her parents divorced in the late 1920s, and Tina and Florence went on to live with Florence’s mother (also called Florence) in Worchester, Massachusests.

Tina’s mother, who was college educated, ran a singing school in Worchester, and Tina, naturally, took up singing from an early age. The mother-daughter duo moved to Boston when Tina was 8, and later to New York when she was 14 years old. She got into acting by a random act of fate: while on vacation in Provincetown, Massachusetts, she was spotted by a theater director, and given a chance to act.