Doing what we can to repair the world was instilled in me from an early age. I will never forget my siblings and me knitting squares for blankets to be sent to the troops during World War II. This was an inspiration from my mother.
Roy, the guy I play in 'The Grifters,' is a guy who had a very bleak life. His mother had him at 13, and then when she was 17 or 18 and he was 4 or 5, they were trapped in a small Texas town somewhere, and she was ready to do anything to get out.
I'm destiny's child. I wasn't meant to be born: my mother bled for four months when she was pregnant, and then she fell down the stairs in her eighth month of pregnancy. She nearly died; I believe I came into this world for a reason.
I wouldn't want to be a mother that put blinders on and didn't see what was going on with my child. There can be huge consequences to such a thing.
Mother always said that even when I was 3, I used to get the 6- and 7-year-old kids on the block and punch them and say, 'Listen to me.'
My mother told me once that she had her talk with God whenever she started a new sweater: 'Please don't take me in the middle of the sweater.' And as soon as she finished knitting a sweater, and it was blocked and put together, she already had the wool to start the next sweater so that nothing bad would happen.
When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said - and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded - 'It's like hair color. It's nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It's not a subject.' This was a very healthy attitude.
Not many people know this about me, but I'm a natural blonde. My hair went from light blonde naturally to a darker kind of blonde. My mother dyed my hair dark when I was a child, as I loved the look then. So I'm basically a natural blonde.
I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.
My mother's husband Harry Bloom was a writer, a novelist, a reporter, and an anti-apartheid activist.
When my sister and I were very young, my father used to tell us fairy stories that he'd made up. My mother was always telling him that he should write them down, but he would say, 'Well, they've all been done before. There are so many blooming books in the world - why should I write another one?'
I had to come out to my mother three times over a twelve-year period, but I first came out to her when I was sixteen. It didn't go over so well, because I grew up in the Pentecostal Church. It was a very strict environment. She has since done a lot of work and has really blown my mind. She has learned about my life and has changed her mind.
And I come here as a daughter, raised on the South Side of Chicago - by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me.
I come from a blue-collar family. My father worked at the American Can Company as a mechanic. He broke his back and was disabled, and the first memory I have of him is in the hospital. My mother was a working mother - she had two jobs. Everybody in the house had to help out.
The only honourable work my parents knew was blue-collar. But while my father Robert ran a pawnbroker's shop, and my mother was a waitress, I moved into a middle-class world with a level of security they never knew.
I spent my entire childhood in the same town, in Kent. I went to grade school there. There was a boarding school that my mother taught at, called - appropriately enough - Kent School, that I went to. Yeah, pretty much my entire childhood was spent in that town.
There are so many different elements to surfing. Small waves, big waves, long boards, short boards. This makes it a sport you can share with people. It's not just a solitary thing - it's become a family thing, too. It's about exercising and passing something on from father to son, and from mother to daughter.
For me, my body image struggle started very young. All that I heard from my mother, my aunts, and my mom's friends was, 'I gotta lose five pounds.' At 5 years old, I learned a size 2 is not thin enough. It was, 'Don't eat carbs! Don't eat sugar! Drink Diet Coke! You always diet!' So that was engrained in my brain at a very early age.
I can't cook! It's genetic. My grandmother can't cook, my mother can't cook. I was raised to believe you eat because your body needs fuel for energy, so I eat super foods.
Life guided me to being a bodyguard, protecting people, then in the movies, so I'm happy with everything because basically all I ever wanted to do was be a good son and take care of my mother.
