I personally don't like school, but you have to do it if you want to get through life, so pretty much I put up with it.
I certainly went to high school with some mean girls, and I would not wish that hell on anybody.
Everybody's like, 'You're tall. You didn't play basketball?' They asked me when I was a freshman in high school, and basketball practice was the same time a lot of stuff happened with choir. And I picked choir, which, normally, people would scratch their heads at, but it worked out okay.
I was lousy in school. Real screwed-up. A moron. I was antisocial and didn't bother with the other kids. A really bad student. I didn't have any brains. I didn't know what I was doing there. That's why I became an actor.
You know all those models who say, 'I was so tall and lanky and everyone picked on me at school' - I was not that girl. I hear that and I'm like, 'Oh, you poor thing!'
The first music-learning thing that I took seriously was piano lessons when I was a kid. I guess that was probably the only time that I was forced to perform music, because I had piano recitals, and my school also had mandatory music classes that had some performing required.
I was a jock, hardcore sports all the way down the line, but I heard that if you auditioned for this arts school, you got time off school, and that sounded good to me.
I never thought that the long haired, bearded guy I married in law school would end up being President.
I can still remember. I was ill, and I was seven, and my father didn't want me to just read children's books. He came with Conan Doyle. I tried, and I liked it. I think the first I read was 'The Sign of the Four'; 'Study in Scarlet' was the next one. Then I guess I stayed home a few extra days from school to read.
I don't have any siblings, but I have best friends that I have known since kindergarten that I'm protective of. If they call me and tell me someone was mean to them at school - I want to go to school and be mean to that person and try to stand up for them.
For reasons that baffle me still, my high school sports coaches put me in the first division of the rugby, cricket, and soccer teams.
In high school, I had two friends that were suffering from cancer. I would go and sing for them while they were in hospital, and I sang at their services after they passed.
My mother had lived in London since I was little, so she never got to see my school plays and stuff.
I can still remember my mum (a voracious, if not discriminating, reader - I have seen everything from the sublime to the ridiculous by her bed, from Ian Rankin and Elmore Leonard to Barbara Cartland and James Patterson) taking me to get my library card when I was four and not yet at school.
Growing up as a young black girl in Potomac, Maryland was easy. I had a Rainbow Coalition of friends of all ethnicities, and we would carelessly skip around our elementary school like the powerless version of Captain Planet's Planeteers.
Playing athletics, playing a lot of different sports, going to drama school... I was one of those kids who wanted to do everything, so I ended up being pretty average at everything.
With any tween, you have issues, from what they are going to wear to school, to how do you get them to speak politely, to how regularly they lose their contact lenses.
I was voted funniest person in my middle-school yearbook. So I guess I was funny in middle school?
The best job was when I was at drama school and I cleaned flats in the Barbican. I loved it. They were spotless anyway, so you'd just watch the telly and flick a duster around.
You couldn't keep me out of the school plays, the song and dance skits.
You should never do anything too much. If you only eat healthy food, that is too much. Success is balance - a banker with no time with his kids, he's not successful. If he doesn't have time to walk his kids to school, that is not success - that is a mistake.
I have suffered from bullying in many ways, from bullying in school due to my disability in reading, to digital abuse that I deal with on a daily basis. I'd like to tell the kids that are being bullied that no one should have to deal with the abuse, ever!
I'm a very creative person, but that side of me was suppressed because I was academic. I was depressed at school, and I didn't know why.
There was a big drive when I was at art school to make you aware of the economy of meaning - after all, this was still during the tail end of minimalism. Being responsible for everything you put in your picture, and being able to defend it. Keeping everything clear around you so you know what is operating. To open the wound and keep it clean.
Mark Wahlberg, when I was in high school, people were like, 'You look like Marky Mark!' Then as I got older, they were like, 'You look like Donnie Wahlberg.' Now they're like, 'You look like Donnie Wahlberg's cousin from Massachusetts.'
I loved David Lean, he had a huge influence on me when I was going to film school.
When families save, they can get through emergencies like a bad harvest or a medical emergency. But it's more than that. They can also plan for the future, gradually saving up for a small business or for their children's school tuition.
I got some funky scholarships to play soccer and did well in my SATs, so I went off to college and then grad school but found that that wasn't me. My family, relieved I seemed to have come to my senses, were happy to let me go to film school.
I would play hooky from school and spend all day in the movie theaters. Consequently, I learned satire in all its subtle forms.
I know this sounds terribly shallow, but I've been mapping out my outfits for the next day every day since I was little, even before high school.
All I did was go to school and play golf. I didn't have much of a social life.
I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an 'unaccompanied minor' made me blase about the rigors of air travel.
I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.
I like eggs. My favorite way of cooking eggs is old school French.
I was in high school when Will Ferrell was first on 'Saturday Night Live', and I remember thinking, 'Man, that guy is the funniest guy ever.'
I was Paul Schrader's assistant for six months before I went to film school, and he's very much about knowing what's going to happen on every page before you even start writing dialogue - the entire plot and character arcs are mapped out.
