A native of Czechoslovakia, Albright is a naturalized American citizen. Her father, Josef Korbel, served in the Czechoslovakian diplomatic service, which allowed the Korbels to live in London during World War II. The Czechoslovakian government sent Josef Korbel on assignment to India in early 1948. While Korbel family was out of the country, the Czech government was overthrown in a Communist coup, and Korbel learned that he was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. The United States granted him and his family political asylum, and the Korbels moved to Colorado where Josef Korbel became a professor of international relations at the University of Colorado. He eventually became dean of the Graduate School of International Studies there. Madeleine Albright recalls being influenced by the intellectual humanism of her father.

After graduating with honors from Wellesley College in 1959, Madeleine Korbel married Joseph Albright, a newspaper journalist, and moved with him first to Chicago, then to the New York City area. During that period, she earned a master's degree and a certificate in Russian Studies from Columbia University's Institute on Communist Affairs. In 1968 the Albrights moved to Washington, D.C., where Madeleine began her political career by serving on the school board and raising funds for the 1972 presidential campaign of Edmund S. Muskie. He hired her as his chief legislative assistant. Muskies membership in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee introduced Albright to foreign-policy formulation at the highest level of government.

In 1978 Albright became a staff member of the National Security Council, where she served under her former college professor Zbigniew Brzezinsi, the national security advisor for the Carter White House. In 1981 and 1982 Albright served as a senior fellow in Soviet and Eastern European affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institutions Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. Albright was appointed research professor of international affairs at the Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in 1982.

Two years later, Albright served as the foreign policy coordinator for the Walter F. Mondale/Geraldine A. Ferraro presidential campaign. Then, in 1987, she became presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis's senior foreign policy adviser. In the presidential campaign of 1992, Albright helped the Democrats formulate the party's platform, and, after Clinton was chosen as the Democratic candidate, Albright prepared foreign policy papers for him. President-elect Clinton named Albright as his choice for U.N. delegate, and the Senate unanimously confirmed her nomination on January 27, 1993.

Albright was surprised to find out recently that her ethnic background is Jewish. Her parents had converted their family to Catholicism to hide their Jewish background while they were living in London in 1939. During the Communist reign, authorities honored Communist martyrs killed by the Nazis, but the fate Czechoslovakias 100,000 Jews was hidden. After the fall of Communism in 1989, a museum recalling the Jewish ghetto opened, and in 1995 authorities published a list of the more than 70,000 Czechoslovakian Jews who died. The names of Madeleine Korbel Albrights paternal grandparents -- Arnost and Olga Korbel -- are on the list of Jews killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.