America has been the country of my fond election from the age of thirteen, when I first saw it. I had the honour to hoist with my own hands the flag of freedom, the first time it was displayed, on the Delaware; and I have attended it with veneration ever since on the ocean.
My siblings and I had to earn our own pocket money so from the age of about 10 I had a job. I did a paper round, helped with the farmer’s delivery at the weekend, cut hedges for neighbours and worked on a market stall. Then I’d go and buy a record with my hard-won money.
I was on the national Pentathlon team for a few years, but there was no funding for athletes in Canada. I was in a massive amount of personal debt at the age of 21, so I joined a little modelling and talent agency to get a some work, to do anything so that I didn’t have to drop out of school.
I also find it interesting that a lot of people in their 30s are not married and don’t have kids. There are a lot of people in this age bracket that are out there dating and trying to find love. And I never thought that at my age I would be.
With portable cameras and affordable data and non-linear digital editing, I think this is a golden age of documentary filmmaking. These new technologies mean we can make complicated, beautifully crafted and cinematic films about real-life stories.
As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.
I get bullied for my size, my weight, and my look constantly. It’s something that I’m glad we touched on in WWE. I’m glad we touched on it because it’s real: it’s something that happens in real life to kids all the time, especially in the age of cyber bullying.
One of the problems of modern society, or the post-Internet age, is that there are so many things bombarding us that we could care about. I think it’s more important than ever to really get clear and focus on what’s worth caring about and what’s just noise or distraction.
We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.
When I was a critic, I reviewed Public Enemy’s ‘Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age’ – this is back in ‘94 – and I called it a ’Dante-esque spiral of the hip-hop hell.’ I idolized Chuck D, but I just hated that record, and I did not hold back. Chuck didn’t freeze me out. Every time I met Chuck, he always treated me with the utmost respect.
Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader’s imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
As a young actor, I was advised to bide my time. Back then, there weren’t good roles for someone like me. There were handsome leading men and character actors for smaller supporting roles. But I was told to hang in there, and it was good advice. We’re all character actors now. Even a handsome man is a character actor at my age.
Did you come of age in those sweet summers of the early nineteen-sixties, when the airwaves were full of rock and roll’s doo-wop promise of joy and the nation was full of J.F.K.’s eloquent promise of a New Frontier? I did. Life seemed to be laid out before us like a banquet; everything was for the taking, especially hearts.
Shirin Farhad’ is a romantic tale of an unmarried couple who feel they can live together forever. Having crossed the marriageable age, what happens to them forms the crux of the story. The movie has several comic sequences with an emotional touch to it.
Light and funny has a more compelling quality when you’re younger. But I haven’t abandoned the genre: I love falling down; I love Lucille Ball. It’s just that a lot of those stories revolve around problems that I can’t convincingly portray at this age.
I just think that knowing about your body at any age, whether it’s educating yourself on fertility, getting mammograms, going through puberty – whatever it may be, is really important. I just really encourage women empowerment and being comfortable talking about these issues.
I don’t think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.
My father had a real short fuse. He had a tough life – had to support his mother and brother at a very young age when his dad’s farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. My father was full of terrifying anger.
I had a lot of trouble speaking as a kid. I didn’t really speak in coherent sentences until I was, like, 6 years old. There was a long time where everybody was very worried, because my sisters were so advanced for their age, and I would barely talk.
You never see a child die from education on TV. But make no mistake about it: children die from lack of education all the time. Children without an education are more likely to grow up to have HIV/AIDS. They’re more likely to die in infancy or before the age of five.
I’m tired of playing people who are complete washouts and bums. I don’t mind waiting for the good ones to come along. It’s like age. It’s never bothered me. I’ve even forgot my birthday. Many times I’ve wondered if I should tell my real age, but now I think it’s an honor, to be doing what I’m doing now at my age.
Bath was dusty and a little shabby when we moved here. It did look its age and you felt its history in its streets and buildings and little alleyways. The sense of the past was palpable. There were some bad modern buildings but there was a patina of age.
I’ve never been willing to lie about my age. Why on earth would I want to tell people I’m 35, which I’m not, and have them say, ‘Oh that’s nice,’ when I could tell them I’m 47, which I am, and have them look at me and go, ‘Whoa!’. I’m not afraid of aging. I stopped being afraid of life a long time ago.
The way I looked when I started modelling – I was a skinny schoolgirl, stuffing tissues into my little 32A bra. I wasn’t trying to be that thin; I was perfectly healthy, but still – that look is a total impossibility for women over the age of 20. Fashion has a lot to answer for, doesn’t it?
Our age gives the more receptive among the young such a sense of social responsibility that one is inclined at times to fear that social interests may encroach upon individual development, that a knowledge of all the ills affecting the community may act as too powerful a damper on the joys of youth.
