I never saw Portsmouth by day.
It was always acting, singing and dancing that I loved.
Making a film of a work you've played for six weeks gives you intimate knowledge of the character. By the time you go in front of the camera you've worked out the behavior and life of a character.
Thank God that I am not over 75 so that James Earl Jones knows who the hell I am.
I didn't want to do anything my mother wanted me to do so surely I wasn't going to sing for her.
It was always acting, singing and dancing that I loved. Not the horror of performing on the piano in front of an assembled audience of quiet people. I'd forget the piece just before I went out to do the concerto, the panic was too great. This was not anything that gave me pleasure. This was fulfilling somebody else's dream.
We do a lot of shows for young people who have probably never been to the theater before and they are learning about the Holocaust, which unhappily, many of them do not know about.
I'd already made the decision before I'd even read it-just because it was John Sayles. Then when I read it, the themes were actually themes that have been a big part of my life.
I think everyone is born funny. Sadly, some lives beat it out of them. I don't know what allows someone to keep being funny and actually make a career of it.
I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.
This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.