Growing up with Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek - people who were always trying to do something else - I wanted to follow in their footsteps. They gave people a different perspective of how women were supposed to look like and be.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I look at the careers of people I'm standing on the shoulders of. People like Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., and Sarah Vaughan. These are icons I wanted to emulate, and I feel like they've been holding me up for quite a long time.
My mother and my sisters - five girls - were crazy about glamour and Hollywood movies. I styled myself on Veronica Lake and Marlene Dietrich.
I was really inspired by these larger-than-life female artists like Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse and Yvonne Rainier and the incredible Lynda Benglis. There were many women who were really driven and became successful, who were part of essential paradigm shifts, despite the fact that the art world was still dominated by men.
When I was little, I always wanted to grow up to be like Jessalyn Kincaid and Vanessa Severo. They showed me how much joy performing can give you.
The Hollywood lifestyle was just overwhelming. A party here, an interview there, magazine and modeling shoots daily, your face everywhere and girls throwing themselves at you. As great as it felt at the time, I still felt something missing, and that I needed to change.
I had the serendipity of modeling during a temporary interlude between Twiggy and Kate Moss, when it was actually okay for women to look as if we ate and enjoyed life.
There are some strong female performers out there. But the industry's pre-occupation with the packaging of how a woman looks has gone completely the other way, back to almost the 60s, early 70s.
Growing up, my inspirations were Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, all these martial arts legends. I wanted to express my talent on screen in a certain way. I felt that it made me a little different.
I always wanted to be a model, never an actress. I would see children in ads and stuff and wanted to be like them.
I never wanted to work in fashion. At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater! And I was crazy for the Hollywood of the 1950s: Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones. They were my idea of glamour - and Sylvie Vartan, the French singer.