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My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.

Every child growing up will look to their parents, my mother and my father. My grandmother lived with us. I picked up quite a bit of family lore and history from her, which was interesting.

I discovered that there is Indian blood in my ancestry on my father's side - a fact that had not been talked about in my family. No wonder I've often been cast in exotic roles - Indian princesses, Russian revolutionaries, Algerians, Gypsies and Greeks.

The thing that interests me most about family history is the gap between the things we think we know about our families and the realities.

Ultimately, my connection to my Indian-ness comes back to my mom and dad. They would all tell me and my siblings stories about their life in India, so it was very close to my two brothers and my sister and I.

I would ask my dad what he did, and he'd say, 'I listen to people's problems.' In some way what he did for a living is in my genes.

I talk to my kids about my mother's energy and how she would have loved them. I talk about how kind and polite my father was. So that they have some kind of remembrance that even though my parents died from their addictions and so that they know they were genuine in how they were.

I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.

From the time I was a little girl, I'd just always been naturally curious. And I was raised in a family that... would just get really worked up about inequities and unfairness.