I started in the kitchen of a Holiday Inn in Birmingham. I wanted to be a sponge, wanted to learn and progress. I knew I didn't want to work in a hotel forever, but I had some good teachers there.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I left school when I was 14 to work in kitchens.
Professionally, I was at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and did lots of things there, and then I won the BBC Carlton Hobbs Award, so I did some BBC Radio drama work, which is a lovely way to start out because you work with lots of great people, and you're working all the time, so you're learning rather than sitting around and waitressing.
I started culinary school at a very young age, and really I wanted to be out working, cooking, more than I wanted to be in a classroom. You could say I wasn't a very good student - I wanted to be a student of life and experience.
I left school on a wet Thursday afternoon, found a room in a shared house in North London, and started my first job on the following Monday as a courier for an advertising agency.
I left Israel to work as a model, to just make money - I didn't care if I was doing an ad for toilet paper or diapers, I just really wanted to allow myself to go to school, to go to university without waitressing, because when I'm in a school environment I just really like to study and have the best grades and learn as much as I can.
I was dishwasher, then promoted to chef in a local kitchen in a restaurant in Seattle, and I was working on a building site as well, putting in insulation and painting houses, and then doing some classes at a community college nearby.
I went to work in accounting at Arthur Andersen. At one point, it was the creme de la creme. I wanted to work there because it looked like the hardest thing I could find, and I loved being on a steep learning curve. I progressed quickly, and two years out of college, I was managing a small team of people.
I grew up in England, went to a nice public school, then didn't want to go to university, so I thought I would wander around. I did a season skiing, a bit of sailing, typical spoilt brat stuff. I ended up in the Caribbean. I was having a blast.
I always wanted to be a teacher.
In my gap year between college and drama school, I taught art at a hospice and worked at a little coffee shop across the street from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London when everything around it was still a construction zone.