Peter Fleming was a famous English traveler, explorer and adventurer, whose non-fiction books were hugely successful. My father owned signed copies of all of them – he and Peter Fleming had become acquainted over some detail of set design at the Korda film studio in Shepperton – and I had read each of them with breathless adolescent excitement.
I suffered a lot when I tried to make sanitary napkins and promote the idea. My family – including my mother and wife – deserted me. Villagers even tied me to a tree and beat me. But after seeing me successful now, they come and say that they all knew that I would become famous one day.
If you have a famous parent, you know that being famous doesn’t make you superior to anyone else. It just means people smile at you more. Everyone was fawning all over my father, but of course, the way you look at your parents when you’re a teen is often with a… more critical eye.
That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‘unhappy is the family that contains an author’?
I have this ambition that when I become powerful and famous, I will host an event of boxing or kick-boxing, which the entire nation watches. That way, this sport will gain attention. People will realise that there is a lot of talent in India.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn’t believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don’t have an alternative theory.
When I started out as a model, I took things for granted. Because I bagged work thanks to my looks, I didn’t give my body any importance. I was a couch potato who’d eat anything. Then, in 2005, a tabloid ran a story calling me fat. I thought, ‘I’m famous. How can I be fat?’ It was a slap. I decided to get fit.
Through the eight books in ‘The Treasure Chest’ series, readers will meet twins Maisie and Felix and learn the secrets and rules of time travel, where they will encounter some of these famous and forgotten people. In Book 1, Clara Barton, then Alexander Hamilton, Pearl Buck, Harry Houdini, and on and on.
I don’t care to be famous. But at the same time, you look at all the role models these little girls have, and they don’t have anyone to look up to. I mean, it’s weird, but if I just hid out and didn’t let myself be known, who would they look up to instead, you know?
As long as I’ve been doing Ghost, at least, I’ve been very keen on maintaining not necessarily an anonymity but a low profile. But on the other hand, I spent 25 years not doing Ghost, where, 20 of those years, I wanted to be nothing but a famous rock musician.
Edgar Degas’s famous sculpture, ‘Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,’ served as my muse for ‘The Painted Girls.’ I came upon a television documentary on the work, and as someone who held the sculpture in high esteem and who largely considered ballet to be the high-minded pursuit of privileged young girls, I was struck by what I would learn.
I don’t want to become a star. I never wished to become an actor, even when I am here. When you decide to become an actor, you’ve to choose why you’re doing it. Are you doing it to become an actor or because you want to be famous? I am doing it because I love being in front of the camera.
I grew up with a pretty tough mom. She was a self-appointed neighborhood watchdog, and if she saw that any of the local boys were up to no good, she would scold them on the spot. Although she is only 5 feet 2, she was famous in our neighborhood for intimidating men three times her size and getting them to do the right thing.
A friend at school was always being laughed at because his father emptied dustbins for a living. But those who laughed worshipped famous footballers. This is an example of our topsy-turvy view of ‘success.’ Who would we miss most if they did not work for a month, the footballer or the garbage collector?
I’ve never been overwhelmed with a desire to become famous. It’s not that I didn’t want to have my work appreciated, but for some reason – maybe it’s because my father disapproved of almost everything I did – in some secret place in my being was a desire to avoid success.
I’ve had the chance to work with Christopher Plummer, one of the great stage and film actors, a couple of times, including on ‘Prototype,’ the first TV movie I ever did. It was science fiction in the Ray Bradbury sense, written by the famous team who created Columbo, Levinson, and Link.
I don’t like a girl on social media, when you have an open inbox, answering questions from dudes left and right every day. What’s the point? It’s like having your number all out. Everybody think they’re famous when they get 100,000 followers on Instagram and 5,000 on Twitter.
Donors want to meet famous people, and getting a high profile draw for a fundraiser is one way to boost both the crowd and the cash. It’s why the president and the vice president are always in demand. These folks are in demand because people around the country want to meet them.
What intrigues me is that there are funny people in the real East End. It’s famous for it. There’d be blokes dressing up as women as a lark, but ‘EastEnders’ seems blind to the fact that they enjoy a laugh. There should be a cheery chappy on there.
My wife, she is so good. She was a famous singer – had a show in Carnegie Hall, did a big city tour for RCA. Then she made the mistake of marrying me. The next year, another tour, but the third year, she had Mario and said, ‘Either I’m a mother or a singer.’
When we made ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ we got riddled. There was this famous article Roger Ebert wrote just blasting the film because he had gone to see it at some screening where there were all these kids in the audience. I don’t know why that happened. We didn’t make the movie for kids.
I was shooting a mini-series for Sundance/BBC, called ‘Top of the Lake,’ that was shot by Jane Campion, who’s a beautiful native New Zealander and famous film director. The role I was playing was very intense, and they shaved half my hair off. So, I looked like this post-apocalyptic character.
Famous people are deceptive. Deep down, they’re just regular people. Like Larry King. We’ve been friends for forty years. He’s one of the few guys I know who’s really famous. One minute he’s talking to the president on his cell phone, and then the next minute he’s saying to me, ‘Do you think we ought to give the waiter another dollar?’
Maybe Elvis was inhibited by inbred religious prohibitions or an Oedipal complex, or maybe he simply preferred the thrill of a denied release. Whatever put the brakes on the famous pelvis, it ground to a halt at a certain point, and that was it.
What I can’t completely understand is most other people’s fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies. Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognise their names and faces but know almost nothing else about them?
