Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was accepted to UCLA, but at the same time, I had a job offer at Chicago's Chez Paree nightclub. My father, being a practical man, felt I should take the job.
My mother and father didn't know anything about instruments. Me just see a man in the country play guitar one time and say, 'My, the man play that guitar nice.'
Before becoming an action director in 1990, my father was a stunt man for about 8 years. During that time, he was body double to many actors in that era, one of them being Sanjay Dutt.
My great-grandfather was a kola nut trader and the richest man in West Africa at the time of his death. My father was a businessman and politician. I was actually raised by my grandfather.
When I was young I was one of the second generation of black people in Holland. My father was the first. My mother was white, and living with a black man at that time and having a how-you-say half-caste boy is not easy.
When I started with Ramesh Sippy's 'Buniyaad' in 1985, I was in my mid-20s and within a year, I was elevated from a lover to a father and then to a grandfather. By the time the show finished, I was portraying the role of an 80-year-old man.
The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.
The school in the Yorkshire mining village in which my father grew up in the 1920s and 1930s allowed only a few children to go to high school, and my father was not one of them. He spent much of his time as a young man repairing this deprivation, mostly at night school.