My dad is a successful television producer, director and writer, and my mom's a director and writer. Even when I was young, I wanted to be an actress.
Dad played with me a great deal, as dads should do, and our chief sport was baseball. He bought me a hardball when I was three years old, and he used to sit in a rocker on the front porch while I sat on the grass in the yard, and we'd play catch by the hour.
Both Mum and Dad were converts to Catholicism, and normally if you convert to Catholicism you have thought about it more than someone who just grew up with it, taking it for granted.
People have told me to change it over the years, but my dad is always saying, 'Never change your name!' My middle name is O'Hara, so it's a pretty epic name. Emily O'Hara Ratajkowski.
I'm lucky to have my dad in my life. He's very brilliant, I think he's really a smart man, and he's a kind guy.
I was good at football and cricket at school. My dad said, 'Son, be an architect,' and I came to Melbourne passionate about becoming an architect.
My dad had an aunt at the turn of the century who died from diabetes, but she was the closest affected relative in my family.
My dad worked for Nestle for 26 years and ended up being the mayor of our hometown. One of the lessons I learned from him was to never mistake kindness for weakness.
I think I knew I was going to be a musician for the rest of my life kind of early. When I was in third grade, I was playing in a talent show, and my dad wrote a two- or three-minute boogie-woogie piece. I played it, everybody loved it, and I was like, 'Wow, this is great.'
I fell in love with stories watching a British television puppet show called 'Thunderbirds' when it first came out on TV, about 1965, so I would have been 4 or 5 years old. I went out into the garden at my mom and dad's house, and I used to play with my little dinky toys, little cars and trucks and things.
My mom's a Catholic, and my dad's a Jew, and they didn't want anything to do with anything.
Mum and dad would drive me to the ACT Academy of Sport gym at 5 A.M., sit in the car and read a book, and then drive me to school. I appreciated it when I was younger, but I didn't really understand how much they were putting into it. Now I look at budgets of $70,000 to compete, and I think, 'Wow, they've put so much into this.'
My dad was always taking photos of us at home, and even on set - he'd bring us along and stick us in the photos in the background. It was almost the beginning of acting for me, like, 'Hey, you go over there and play basketball in the background, and don't even think about the camera.'
I was in Toronto with my parents, and my dad took me to an outdoor hockey rink. I was 3 or 4, and I just remember everything about that day. For some reason, I thought, 'This is it. This is what I'm supposed to do.' And this is around the time that Gretzky came to L.A., so I immediately joined a hockey league.
I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.
I remember my dad asking me one time, and it's something that has always stuck with me: 'Why not you, Russ?' You know, why not me? Why not me in the Super Bowl?
All my brothers and my dad at one point had dreadlocks.
When I wanted to go away to college in Toronto, my dad said, 'You can't go.' When I got to Toronto, I bought a couch, and my dad cried for the whole weekend because, as my mum told me, 'Now you have furniture; he knows you are never coming back.'
I don't care where you went to school. There - have I made your day? No? All right, I'll go further: I also don't care what your dad did for a living or how your mum voted. Nor do I mind whether you ate your tea in front of the telly, dinner at the kitchen table, or supper in the dining room.
My dad was always busy. You would pop round for a cup of tea, and within minutes you would see him walking past with a step-ladder. He was always fixing things.
My dad passed when I was 6. I found out when I was about 21 that my dad always said acting would be the making of me. Where he got that from, I have no idea.
Mum doesn't like it when I mention that Dad's a better cook than her. He was born in Spain and spent eight years in Portugal and is exceptional at lots of cuisines.
We sang a lot of church music. We were very active Baptists. Supposedly, I started singing when I was being given a bath - at 14 months or something like that. My mother and dad both swore that was true, but I'm sure it wasn't very good... We always had the Metropolitan Opera on the radio on Saturday afternoons.
My dad was a film professor, so he would take me to wildly inappropriate movies.
I was trying to make art that my son could look on in the future and would realize I was thinking about him very much during these times... that he can look and see my dad's thinking about me, but to also embed in these things something that is bigger than all of us.
I'm always sad when Dad doesn't like my columns. He waits for them every week and usually likes them, in which case he doesn't say a word - it's only if he's critical that he bothers to call.
There are moments when I invoke my dad and think about him on the podium, but in a very positive way. I don't feel at all intimidated by him. I feel like I've found my own voice.
I was lucky enough to watch my son hit a grand slam at sports camp, and that was great. Yes, I may miss some things, but honestly, I think I get to see more than a dad who works a daily 9 to 5.
My dad was a particularly polite kind of guy, very courteous.
You have to succeed as a young actor, then as a dad actor, those would be my 'Harvey Moon' years, then as an old actor.
There's so much fakeness in the fashion world, but Mum and Dad have always given us a good work ethic and were quite worried at first about whether I could make a living from acting. They've been together for 29 years and share the same values. I really do want to have that kind of marriage myself.
There were a lot of assumptions that we were raised a certain way. Our dad was always really clear with us that he is rich and we are not: 'If you want to be rich, you should go do what I did, which is work really hard.'
Most young people haven't used their storytelling skills since they were 8 or 9 or 10 and wanted to persuade Mom and Dad to take them to the ball game.
People say, 'You will be 30 years old; you're too old. You'll get your nose broke,' say dad's a pushy dad. You hear stupid things and put them out of your mind.
If I played Bond, my dad probably wouldn't know what to do with himself. He'd probably put his shoes on the wrong way for the rest of his life!
I listened to a battery radio, old country and pop stuff. Because I was singing all the time, my dad bought me a $7.50 guitar.
