When my mother was raising me, she moved us upstate to the Woodstock area. Our closest neighbor was a mile away. She planted all her own vegetables.
Being a mother makes everything more urgent.
My mother always worked and thought staying at home was a bit twee, and that you should get your act together and do something useful. Now I think that's the most useful thing you can do: bring up some non-criminals.
I grew up in Burbank - but not the Burbank of valet parking and TV studios. In the late 1950s, there was a small apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue that rented mostly to families on welfare. I lived there from age 3 to 11 and again from 14 to 18 with my mother, Shirley, and my younger sister, Toni.
I, of course, was born as if I was a movie star in my head. Even though I had nothing, in my head I was always royalty. My mother always said, 'I don't know where you came from'. I didn't have their value system. And I always lived beyond my means.
One of the great things about my mother is she really valued people's character more than what they did.
That was the fun of acting, being a blank canvas you could transform into the character - Indian princess, 20s vamp, Mother Courage, Oxford don, 94-year-old wife.
Certainty is the mother of quiet and repose, and uncertainty the cause of variance and contentions.
In my own family, my mother had my sister when I was 15 and for various reasons, I was extremely involved in raising her.
No, I have not a drop of what they call white blood in my veins. My father was a full blooded Negro, and my mother was a full blooded Chippewa.
I was 9 years old when my father - a strong, vibrant man in his early 40s - died of a heart attack. He was such a central figure in our lives that losing him was a terrible shock to all of us, my mother in particular.
My mother used to tell me about vibrations. I didn't really understand too much of what that meant when I was just a boy. To think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed scared me to death.
My mother told me on several different occasions that she was livin' her dream vicariously through me. She once said that I was getting' to do all the things that she would have wanted to have done.
When my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him. My mother found him at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste.
I've never really been serious about my villainy. I don't have a master plan. I suppose my philosophy is: Every villain has a mother. For every cold-blooded killer on your screen, there's a little old lady somewhere who calls him 'sonny.'
I was raised by my great-great aunt. I was adopted within our family. My mother had me when she was, I think, 15, 16. They tried to get her to have an abortion and she refused. So, my 'mama' adopted me, which was really her great aunt, which was really my great-great aunt, who was named Viola Dickerson. I was told that my mother was my sister.
My mother played the piano and my father the violin, I can remember my dad teaching me how to waltz; I had my feet on his, my mother playing the piano, and my husband will tell you the lessons weren't very successful.
I chose the Republican Party early on in the 1950s and 1960s in Massachusetts. My father was a Republican, as was my mother, in Virginia.
When I saw Virginia Woolf, somewhere between the first and second acts, someone I had known as my mother became somebody else.
My mother and father were visionaries in Pittsburgh, part of that collective of people who were creative and active together, and I am a product of that community and those relationships.
