I was like most teenagers. I wanted to look more conventional - you know, to just be the pretty girl in school.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was never pretty enough to be the pretty girl and I was never quirky enough to be the quirky girl. Boys didn't look at me in high school and think I was the pretty girl.
I used to be prettier than I am, but I think I look better now. I was a pretty boy. Particularly in my early movies. I don't like looking at them so much. There's a sort of pretty thing about me.
I was never pretty, never really popular. I was lanky and funny looking.
I was never the pretty girl at school. I'm tiny and mixed-race. I grew up in a white area. I was always the loner.
I wanted to be like my friends. I hung out with girls who had blue eyes and blond hair and I thought, 'I want to look like them!'
I didn't grow up thinking I was pretty; there was always a prettier girl than me. So I learned to be smart and tried to be funny and develop the inside of me, because I felt like that's what I had.
When I was 15, I didn't think I was the prettiest at all. But then something happened when I was 20-something - I thought, actually, I really like what I look like. Just because I don't look like everybody else doesn't mean that I can't be just as beautiful.
At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.
I think I was lucky in that I wasn't one of those girls who are told they are pretty the whole time. I never got that. Nor did I ever obsess about my looks as a teenager.
I spent the first fourteen years of my life convinced that my looks were hideous. Adolescence is painful for everyone, I know, but mine was plain weird.