Ilan Mitchell-Smith was born in New York City and began studying ballet at an early age. After his family relocated to Amherst, Massachusetts, he was enrolled in dance classes four days a week and eventually got a scholarship with the School of American Ballet. While at the ballet, he was discovered by a casting agent for director Sidney Lumet and was signed to play Timothy Hutton's character as a young boy in the film, Daniel (1983). That led to a major role in The Wild Life (1984) in which he played a young man who had a romanticized notion of the '60s, a part that required a lot of research into the milieu of the times.