It all started with my father's directorial debut, 'En Raasavin Manasile,' which starred Raj Kiran sir as the lead.
My father was a statesman, I am a political woman. My father was a saint. I am not.
I can't imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.
I refuse to be held up as some kind of superwoman because, in my mind, the superwomen are the ones who do it on their own. I have my partner, who will be a stay-at-home father. I will do as much as I can, but I will have a village around me, and there's lots of people who don't have that.
My father was an ironworker who eventually co-founded a construction business. My mother, Jeanette, was a stay-at-home mom who had been an operating-room nurse until my older brother, Jimmy, was born.
My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.
The idea of having proper qualifications had been very much ingrained in me. My father had a steady job for the Potato Marketing Board, and the family emphasis was on getting to university.
Emotionality is really easy for me. My father always said that Fondas can cry at a good steak.
I guess it kind of stemmed from my father. He was a union guy working for the meat plant down in Kansas City. He was a union guy, and I guess it was just in my blood.
I had a tough childhood after my father died when I was five, and I had a very difficult stepfather. I want to give my children what I didn't have - a good role model.
The transition from an English father to a Punjabi stepfather demanded an adjustment that was far from easy for a 10-year-old boy who had just lost his father.
The reality is that my stepfather was like a father to me and watching him die from a sudden heart attack was one of the hardest things I have ever gone through.
I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of 'The Wind in the Willows,' which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.
I was a kid who was born and raised on Johnny Cash. My father played 'At Folsom Prison' constantly. Cash was the only thing I remember coming from our big, warm stereo console. Even then, I knew Cash was uncool. I knew he was an unhip Republican.
My father was my first inspiration. He had an incredible stereo and a turntable, and I was told not to touch it. But I'd go back and touch it anyway. I gained a respect for the turntables when I was a kid. When I was a teenager, I came up with a 'cueing system' to work the turntables because they didn't have it at that time.
I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.
I did grow up next door to Steve McQueen, who was a very famous movie star at the time, but as a kid it didn't impress me. We always had great fun with him. He would take us out on Sundays on his motorcycles, riding around in the desert; he was like a second father.
My father has a movement that started before us. As his children, we are just the stewards to build on his foundation.
The great thing that I appreciate - the fact that my godfather, William 'Sticky' Jackson, was a Tuskegee Airman because my father was first born in Ozark, Alabama. The sacrifices and the commitment of those men made it possible for myself and many others.
We used to indulge hopelessly as a family at Christmas. When the children were little, I dressed up as Father Christmas. They knew it was a gag, but they loved it. I remember stealing into their bedrooms at 1 A.M. and filling the stockings up at the end of the bed.
