My father Lloyd Bridges worked on a TV show called 'Sea Hunt.' He impressed upon me as a child the importance of taking care of the ocean and working together to do our part to reduce human pollution.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I became interested in ocean issues in the 1980s when I couldn't take my daughters swimming because of pollution at our local beach. Twenty-five years later, I'm a board member of Oceana, the world's largest international organization dedicated to ocean conservation.
My father Lloyd Bridges was very versatile in his parts, but he had a hit in the '60s 'Sea Hunt,' where he played a skin diver. And he was so into that role that people actually thought he was a skin-diver.
Like my father and grandfather, Philippe and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, I've dedicated my life to exploring and protecting our seas, in large part through documentary film.
Sea Hunt was the first time anyone tackled a show that took place underwater. The stories were sort of exciting for kids, like cops and robbers underwater.
As a kid, I was going to be a marine biologist or an actor. When I became successful as an actor, I said, 'Well, maybe I can lend a voice to this with an equal passion.' You realize how lucky we are and how destructive we've been and what little regard we have for the natural world.
My grandfather pioneered exploration of what he called 'our water planet,' then my father sought to understand the human connection, and now, as part of the third generation, I'm dedicated to not only raising awareness but also to empowering people to take action.
I grew up sailing in the North Sea.
I was a good surfer because we grew up a block from the water, and my father took us to the ocean the way other fathers take their kids to the park.
My dad, he was a construction worker. He was a butcher. He was a deep sea fisherman.
My grandfather was Jacques Cousteau, a pioneer of ocean exploration and the co-inventor of scuba diving. Back in the 1940s when he tested out his invention which allowed humans to swim freely in the ocean with a portable air source for the first time in history, very little of the ocean had been explored let alone captured on film.