I have always known my mother as an agnostic, less certain than my father that the universe hadn't been created by some great intelligence. But she would get even more annoyed than my father did when she thought that people were invoking God to do their jobs for them - for example, when she saw a bus with a sticker saying 'Allah Protect Us.'
I'm not going to normally get hired to play those emotional things, and I'm capable of it. I was raised by a single mother in Iowa - I'm just trapped in a big, dumb body.
My mother is Irish, my father is black and Venezuelan, and me - I'm tan, I guess.
I saw my mother crying for the first time, which made a huge impression on me, when I came home from kindergarten, and she was watching TV because JFK - that Irish Catholic president that we loved - had been killed.
The Iron Curtain may be a thing of the past, but Mother Russia is as mysterious as ever.
Winston Churchill was not entirely British. His mother was American, making Sir Winston part Iroquois Indian.
My father was slower, but he was severer than my mother, who was quick but light and irregular in discipline.
When I was a kid, I used to pretend to be Bond; I used to make up scenarios and irritate my sister and annoy my mother and father pretending to be someone else, so I kind of was already acting when I was a child. I just didn't really know it.
Yes, I remember as a child, I would potter around my mother in the kitchen and want to participate in everything she was doing. I have learnt most of my cooking from her. I also used to irritate her with a lot of questions.
I always found it ironic when a Saudi official bashes Islamists, given that Saudi Arabia is the mother of all political Islam - and even describes itself as an Islamic state in its 'Higher Law.'
Moreover, resolving the mother of all problems - the Israeli-Palestinian question - requires cooperation between Europe and the U.S.
My mother and father were supportive. But in an Italian family, you kind of work with your hands, or you are an engineer or a doctor. But an actor was something they couldn't get hold of. They were afraid I wouldn't be able to make a living, and for many years, they were right.
My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.
I didn't know Penn was an Ivy League school - I didn't know what the Ivy League was. When I got in, they sent me the package, and the tuition was my mother's salary for a year. My mom said, 'We can't afford it.' So I went to the library and found several scholarships and grants and was able to cover 90 percent of my education that way.
My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.
I lost my mother when I was 7 and they put her in a mental hospital. My brother and I watched her being taken away in a strait jacket. That's something you never forget. And my stepmother was like in the movie 'Precious.' I couldn't handle it. So I said to myself, 'I don't have a mother. I don't need one. I'm going to let music be my mother.'
My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see.
My mother thinks Mick Jagger is a foreign car.
I have no mother here; I have a bearer. Jah is my mother, and Jah is my father.
If it weren't for the mentorship and guidance from people like my mother, James Brown and others, I wouldn't have been able to make something of my life.
