Entertainment

Back where I came from: Fallon and his nervous, Irish Catskills clan

Jimmy and Gloria Fallon.

Jimmy and Gloria Fallon. (WireImage)

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Jimmy Fallon grew up pretty much in his backyard.

The product of over-protective parents, the guy taking over “The Tonight Show” next year wasn’t allowed to wander around his upstate Saugerties neighborhood.

“I was born in Brooklyn originally, so all my relatives are still there,” Jimmy said in a Jane magazine interview in 1999. “I left when I was 2 years old. My parents wanted to give us a safe upbringing, a better life . . . for me and my sister.”

Brooklyn in the 1970s was a place to flee — cabs wouldn’t go there, angel dust was hot and “Welcome Back, Kotter” was the borough’s official TV show.

Jimmy’s father — also James — got a job with IBM in upstate Kingston, a two-hour drive north of the city, and the family — Jimmy, big sister Gloria, mother (also Gloria) and the grandparents — was gone.

“When Jimmy and I were growing up in Saugerties, NY,” sister Gloria wrote on her blog, “Growing Up Fallon” (latenightwithjimmyfallon.com), “we spent a lot of time in our backyard, playing just about any sport you can think of.

“Not because we were good at sports or because we loved the backyard — we just weren’t allowed to go anywhere else.”

“We’re really good friends,” Fallon said of his sister. “My parents were really overprotective, so we kinda had to stay in the house. We were forced to hang out with each other.

“We’re a year apart,” he told Jane magazine, adding that in their early 20s they traveled to England together. “Everybody thought we were boyfriend and girlfriend,” he said. “It kinda sucked.”

Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live” and the producer of both Fallon’s “Late Night” and the upcoming “Tonight Show,” says Fallon — who will be 39 when he takes over from Jay Leno next March — is a different late-night breed.

“Conan [O’Brien] and [Jimmy] Kimmel, they grew up on Letterman, idolizing Dave,” he said. “You have to remember, Jimmy was 14 when Letterman started.”

Jimmy was the generation who grew up on “SNL.” And it showed.

“He was always a funny kid,” says Bob Lawless, who was the dean of students at Saugerties High School during Jimmy’s time there.

“My friend, Mike Miller, was Jimmy’s math teacher, and he said Jimmy always did something funny — like in the middle of class when things were dragging.

“He did impressions of ‘Saturday Night Live’ people and he once did a thing from ‘Rocky,’ for a talent show, where he lip-synched that whole big scene between Rocky and [his trainer], Mick.

“He would be in the school office and would have the secretaries cracking up,” Lawless says. “You’d walk into the office and they couldn’t talk because they’d be in tears.

“Believe it or not, when I’m watching him on TV — and I’ve been to his show a couple of times — that’s the same Jimmy Fallon I knew back when he was in high school,” Lawless says.

The old house in Saugerties was sold last year. “I want somebody cool to buy it,” Fallon told Howard Stern when the house-for-sale ad hit the Internet and became big news.

His parents now live in Bronxville, an hour-and-a-half closer to Jimmy and his wife, movie producer Nancy Juvonen, in Manhattan — and not far from the old neighborhood in Brooklyn.