My parents were French and Irish and our family ev...

English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.

People think that if you look fairly reasonable, you can't possibly act, and as I only care about acting, I think beauty can be a great handicap.

You know the passage where Scarlett voices her happiness that her mother is dead, so that she can't see what a bad girl Scarlett has become? Well, that's me.

As you age naturally, your family shows more and more on your face. If you deny that, you deny your heritage.

I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist - although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me.

My inspiration was my mom. She's a great cook, and she still cooks, and we still banter back and forth about cooking. Growing up in a mostly Portuguese community, food was important and the family table was extremely important. At a very young age I understood that.

In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.