In high school, I tried very hard to make everybody like me, which resulted in me being extremely unhappy and in a lot of pain. Therefore, the lesson I got from that was that I can't make everybody happy.
My grandfather had been on the New York City force with his 11 brothers around the turn of the century. He was killed in the line of duty. My father, who was 16, was the oldest son, so he had to quit school and go to work to support his mother.
I unloaded planes for UPS in Louisville, Kentucky. It only was bad because it was called 'Earn to Learn,' where you pay for your tuition for college, but you have to work graveyard shift - midnight to eight A.M. - and then go to school at nine or 10 ...
When I decided I wanted to go to drama school, I realized that a lot of the actors whose careers I really admire and whose work I really admire were English and English trained. I felt there was a real vocational feel to work in the U.K.
My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.
My background is a small town with no movie theater. So... I always pictured myself onstage. I went to acting school and learned all the skills. I left early because I did my first movie and discovered that I really loved the minimalistic work with t...
When I was trying to find work after drama school in London, it felt like the same actors always got the plum roles, especially in television. We have a smaller market place, vastly fewer drama-producing networks, and they seem to compete for the sam...
I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room.
Sometimes when you get on a new movie you kind of how to figure out the way other people work and it can be like being the new kid in high school where you're just trying to find out where your place is on the movie or on the set.
My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together.
Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.
When I am in Madrid, I just like to see my friends and walk around the city. I go to the school where my mum works and help out. My plan B, if acting doesn't work out, is to work with disabled children.
I do a lot for PETA. I do a lot of things I think are really important, I volunteer at school and I'm still amazed I can pay my bills because I feel like I don't work that much, I really don't.
Words and ideas work in the short run to get you through school and to impress educators and employers. But they do not work in the long run or in the deep run. We soon find ourselves separate and without wonder.
I was practically born and raised at 20th Century Fox studio, started to work there selling papers when I was around seven years old, and every summer vacation from school I would work in a various department at the studio. So I was an old-timer when...
I'd been kind of a hiccup in my parents' lives. They lost track of me and I didn't know what I was going to do with myself. And then fate reached in and took me in its hands. I was discovered right out of high school and started getting work.
Any parent who tells their kids that they can't attend a school play or go to a soccer match because they have to work is kidding themselves. It's OK to miss a game or two or a performance here and there, but it's not all right to miss the majority o...
African-Americans are always forced to learn the other culture, but the other culture is not forced to learn ours. I went to acting school at Juilliard, and we learned Shakespeare and Shaw, but we never did the work of a single African-American playw...
At school I'd want to be so small that nobody could see me, and so my work depicts and reflects me - what it felt like to grow up in a world of pain.
In two-parent households, women have increasingly entered the workplace, and in single-parent households, there is even more of a need for the adults to work. That means parents do not fully control their own schedule and have to scramble to find hig...
To this day I get mail from women who say, I went to law school because of your song. But I would hate to think out of the wide spectrum of things I have done in my career, that's all I would be remembered for.
