I went to drama school and, after that, went to Paris to train at a place called Ecole Philippe Gaulier. When I came home, I realised I'd have to have a serious stab at it. I didn't have an agent and didn't have the traditional drama school showcase,...
I just try not to subscribe to the ways of celebrity. I'm not a celebrity, I'm a working actor. A lot of the events - the parties and the premieres that people go to to get noticed - I'm just not into. I'll hang out with my friends, go see punk shows...
For the first few months, I was a comically inept parent. The first night home from the hospital, I held her bare body against my bare chest until a friend who was a doctor came by and asked what I was doing, and told me to put some clothes on that b...
Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it - memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.
I always went to Ireland as a child. I remember trips to Dundalk, Wexford, Cork and Dublin. My gran was born in Dublin, and we had a lot of Irish friends, so we'd stay on their farms and go fishing. They were fantastic holidays - being outdoors all d...
We lived in Northern Quebec, and the nearest school was thirty miles away, so my mother took on the task of home schooling me. She spoke to some friends, received some instructions from the provincial school board, and found some interesting books th...
My plan was always to leave school and live in a flat with some friends, have a 9 to 5 job, and try to get as many gigs as I could. I wanted to keep writing and then eventually, in my twenties, head to a record label and hope they'd sit down and list...
I think of all the things that I've gotten to do, all the wonderful people that I've played with, being in the recording studio with Phil Spector tops them all. And of course, now he is in prison. I hope to visit him, I still consider him a friend, a...
The power of the print reviewer is one of those urban myths. There have always been shows that slipped under the critical radar to become popular successes: 'Tobacco Road', 'Abie's Irish Rose' and our old friend 'Spider-Man', which got the worst revi...
The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute o...
He presented himself as the friend to Main Street America, and yet that aw-shucks persona ended up packaging policies and programs that were at times deeply injurious to the very people he swore to serve. After all, Reaganomics set in motion one of t...
When you go off in the world and make your life, and you come back to your home town, and you find your old high-school friends driving in the same circles, doing the same things, that's what Hollywood's like. It's a little block, little town. It doe...
I did some pretty bad things as a teenager. When I was 13, I took my friend's mom's car out for a joyride, and I actually managed to hit somebody else's car. No one was hurt, but needless to say, I didn't get behind the wheel again until I had my dri...
I've got a nice car. I love my job. I've got a bagel store, and I have breakfast every morning with friends I grew up with. I've been in movies, I've written books - I don't know how that all happened.
Me in high school, I was kind of a loner. I had a handful of friends. I'd eat my lunch in my car every day in my senior year. I went to ballet. I was a ballerina, so I was very focused on that. You kind of have to be. That was two-thirds of my week, ...
The year most of my high school friends and I got our driver's permits, the coolest thing one could do was stand outside after school and twirl one's car keys like a lifeguard whistle. That jingling sound meant freedom and power.
I told my parents I wanted to be an actress years before I wrapped my head around what my dad did for a living. It's not easy to explain the job of the television journalist, especially when a lot of my friends' dads had jobs that were a lot easier t...
Our dad hugged us and kissed us so much that some friends and relatives complained that he was going to turn us into sissies or homosexuals. But my dad didn't care. Let them raise their kids in a reserved and reticent way. He grew up in Israel, and h...
It was hard at school because, growing up, some people wanted to be friends with me just because they wanted to get to my dad and say that they had met him and had gone to our house. I didn't understand it at the time, but the older I got and the mor...
When I knew I was pregnant four years ago with a boy, a friend suggested I call him Cary, but I initially resisted. There was only one Cary Grant. But a week before he was due, I started thinking it would be wonderful to pass the name on to him. And ...
My dad worked for different companies that made whiskey for a long time, so we were definitely whiskey drinkers. Growing up, my friends would get toy cars, and I would get swag from whisky companies.
