I'm not really into destiny, but it's funny - I bumped into a woman who told me about an audition, and now I have a BAFTA.
The organization that I joined when I went to work, the trade association called the Bureau of Advertising, became the first of many over the years in which I was the only woman.
I think there have always been funny women, from Carol Burnett to Joan Rivers. When the audience sees a woman, they innately know she's worked twice as hard to get there, she's had to prove that she can be the leader, first, and then be funny on top of it. She has to emit a confidence that she's in control.
So many people: Lucille Ball is the earliest incarnation of a woman I thought was funny, Joan Rivers, Roseanne, Carol Burnett, Gilda Radnor, down to current times, where you have Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, and Kristen Wiig.
I talk to the guy who busted his butt all week to buy a color TV, and the woman who's raising her kids, the people I owe a debt to. I'm talking to people in hotel rooms, lonesome people.
I feel like, in a lot of shows where the woman is in charge, the woman is this ball buster and the guy is sort of weak and spineless. And that's never been my experience in a relationship. I think it's much more interesting that the guy is the boss. And there are stakes.
I think I was scared of the drag thing, as a lot of gay boys are. It's sort of knocked out of you in junior high. I wouldn't find guys who were very feminine attractive. Then, doing 'Hedwig,' I got to be man and woman, really butch and really femme at the same time, and I realized, this is kind of the ideal.
I feel like, for so many years in the industry, LGBT-identifying actors were told to play small or water themselves down or 'butch it up,' whether you're a male and you're only going out for straight characters because gay characters aren't being written, or you're a woman and you're told to 'femme it up' to play the leading lady role.
I love to see a woman in high-heeled shoes. There's something about the curve of the feet up the leg to the butt that's really, really wonderful, and the right pair of shoes can give you the right silhouette.
I can be standing in Barneys with my coat and purse and my selections, and some white woman will say, 'Can you get this in my size?' What she sees is a black woman, and her service button goes off.
What's hurtful is when you have portrayals like, you know, when you have someone like Jared Leto who accepts an award for 'Dallas Buyers Club,' after playing a trans woman, standing in a full beard and looking fully cis male: it is communicating to our audiences that underneath all of that, it's still a man under that.
When a woman buys shoes, she takes them out of the box and looks at herself in the mirror. But she isn't really looking at her shoes - she's looking at herself. If she likes herself, then she likes the shoes.
When you are having fun and creating something you love, it shows in the product. So when a woman is sifting through a rack of clothes, somehow that piece of clothing that you had so much fun designing speaks to her; she responds to it and buys it. I believe you can actually transfer that energy to material things as you're creating them.
I found the success of 'In a Dark, Dark Wood' really distracting when I was writing 'The Woman in Cabin 10,' but in a way, the fact that 'Cabin 10' was doing well felt quite freeing while I was writing 'The Lying Game.'
My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school.
A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.
Every woman who chooses - joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of their own free will and desire - not to have a child does womankind a massive favour in the long term.
The bottom line is that red carpet helps us broaden the appeal of the brand. Calvin Klein used to be about a very specific woman, but we've dressed so many different women at awards.
I never minded flying cheap. I always said to myself, 'Taking this flight saves enough money to rescue four dogs, or six cats, or will let me make a difference to the one woman saving chimps in Cameroon.'
My philosophy is this: Do not tamper with the anatomy of a woman's body; do not camouflage it.
