No one ever sees the sleepless nights, the years of studying and 14-hour days earning your dues. I spent three years isolated in an academic environment to be the best actor I could.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
A lot of people are surprised to hear that an actor studied for two or three years. They take the craft for granted and wanna just wake up and be an actor.
As an actor, your life experience is just as important as studying.
Every time I work, it's an educational process because I learn by watching other actors. My career is always going to be an ongoing study.
I remember the first film I did, the lead actor would, in between scenes, be reading a newspaper or sleeping and I'd think, 'How can you do that?' But it's so exhausting, you can't be 'on' 12-14 hours a day.
I don't know how other people perceive the lives of actors, but my life is fairly ordinary. I go to work, I come home, I put my kids to bed. If I'm home in time for dinner, I have dinner, and then it's bedtime.
For 50 years, acting was the reason I got up in the morning.
I was studying to be an architect, I wasn't plotting to join the movies. Films were just another career option. I took acting up with the same schoolgirl enthusiasm I had for examinations. Acting is a job and I take it very seriously.
If you want to be watched 24 hours a day in everything you do, you can't turn that around. You can't wake up three years later and say, 'Stop bothering me, I'm a serious actor,' if all you've done is wear certain clothes and show up half-loaded at clubs.
Once I came to acting, it was almost a thing where there weren't enough hours in the day to work on stuff because I was so passionate about it.
I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.