Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
By the time I was 15, my mother had turned me into a real clotheshorse.
It took me a long time to be accepted as an actress, I think, because of the modeling and because of my mother.
My mother is caring and selfless, and really looks after me. When I'm touring, she still picks me up from the airport, no matter what time it is.
My father worked, and my mother played bridge. Every time I went out of the house, I was chauffeur-driven with my nanny next to me to stop me being kidnapped.
People come up to me as I leave the stage after a performance and tell me tey saw my mother onstage with me every time I sing. I keep a sense of humor about it.
There was an old acoustic in the house that my mother had given me for my fifth birthday. I took it off the wall and started jamming. I was seven years old at the time.
With reading, I was very lucky. I had a mother who read to me, not because she had time - she was a busy woman - but she found 10 minutes to come and sit on my bed with a book.
I did a soft drink ad some time back. Later, a mother came to me and said that her child started consuming more of that drink after seeing my ad. It made me measure my actions.
One time, this guy was bothering my mother, and me and my brothers had a stern talking with the guy and a little bit of physicality with him. So he disappeared. But I'm not a magician.
I committed a cardinal sin as a kid. I never spoke, and my mother thought there was something seriously wrong with me. A silent child is regarded as a problem in Ireland, and I just read all the time.
My brother arrived some months after my father left. Um, and he ah, was thus eight years younger than me and it was um, you know, it was such a time that my mother probably had people wondering was it his.
I remember watching steak being cooked on TV and wanting to try it. As a special treat, my mother cooked it for me, and I thought this would be the time I would eat with a knife and fork. Alas, I ate it with chopsticks!
My mother's side taught me to be a little bit afraid of everything. For a long time, I was quiet and cautious. But shyness makes you notice other people's excruciations and feel for them. I think that made a writer of me.
I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn't really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you're trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.
People say to me, 'Oh, being a mother must make you a better actor,' and I think, 'Well, I never sleep, I have very little time to think about anything except when I'm actually there.' I wonder whether that makes me a better actor. I think it must on some level.
I'd been a housewife and mother to our son Thomas Jefferson, and I was looking for a new career. So when my agent called and said a producer named Paul Elliott from E&B productions, the biggest panto company in the country at the time, wanted to meet me I agreed.
I have to thank my mother for this. When I was a little boy she used to teach me poems. I would go in church and tell the poems in church for the Easter program, and again for Mother's Day and any occasion she felt would fit. I was very energetic with delivery at that time as a boy, so it stuck with me.
I was born in Boston, but then I went down to Virginia. We spent a little time in Maryland, and then were in Virginia by the time I was seven. What struck me the most was that my mother thought that she had gone to the middle of nowhere, and we would still drive four hours for her to get her hair cut in Washington, D.C.
My mother graduated from high school in 1969, and on January 3, 1971, she gave birth to me. She was married later that year, but by the time I was 10, she was a divorced single mother of two young boys. To make ends meet, we moved in with my grandparents, who were also housing two of my mother's siblings and their kids.
I'd been drifting and in a very self-destructive bent ever since my mother died and as soon as I dealt with the grief, for the first time in 10 years, I had clarity and I realized: 'I need to make a movie, now, cause if I don't make it now, I might never do it.' That's what pushed me forward, and I immediately moved to Vancouver.