I'll just say it: I'm not the sharpest tool in the box. Being forced to go back to school is still a fear of mine.
When I was a kid, in a very white boarding school in England in the '90s, I had this sort of middle part that kids had - that sort of long, floppy hair. So I was always desperate to have long, floppy hair, and I would try and brush it and spray it, and it would just look like a Brillo pad!
I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.
I still remember the entire Boy Scout motto. I don't remember the serial number of my gun in the army. I don't remember the number of my locker in school. But I remember that Boy Scout code.
There's a great deal of women in film school. I was not the only woman in my class at UCLA. When I went through the Sundance program, it was half women and half men.
My parents divorced when I was seven. Because divorce is messy, for good or ill, they sent me to boarding school.
I began writing in the 4th grade. As a matter of fact, I produced a play for the entire school. It was about Leif Ericson and the discovery of America.
When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.
I was never an actress in high school. I didn't start acting until I was in my twenties. I was just a funny cheerleader. I hadn't even seen a show until I was in my twenties, so I was very late getting into the business.
When I'd get out of school in the afternoon, I would go to the golf course, and I just picked the game up. And when I was 13 years old, I could shoot 70 - even-par 71, one over par and then something like that. I just took a liking to the game.
When I was mayor of New York, my views changed. I began as mayor of New York City thinking that I could reform the New York City school system. After two or three years, four years, I became an advocate of choice, of scholarships, and vouchers, and parental choice, because I thought that was the only way to really change the school system.
When my father became vice president, I was a sophomore in high school. I'd do things like go on a run with my soccer team and purposely dodge the security van. Then my parents compromised with the Secret Service when I went to college. I just had a panic button in my dorm room, so if I pressed that, they'd be there within 2 or 3 minutes.
I was always interested in working with people with disabilities, and in high school I worked with people who had Down Syndrome. That was for an agency called AHRC, Association for the Help of Retarded Children. Then I went to college, and throughout college I volunteered for AHRC.
I attended the elementary school at Schweinfurt and the secondary school.
While you are improvising, you need to be prepared, and I like to have a sense of who the character is, what she likes to read, where she grew up, where we went to school, and what she has for breakfast, so that when I go to set, I'm free to explore.
I went to elementary school in L.A. I was born in L.A. My mother was from Redondo Beach. My father was French. He died six months before I was born, so my mother went home. I was born there. Not the childhood that most people think. Middle-class, raised by my mother. Single mom.
School allowed me to have outlets so that some of the pressure was taken off the acting. Every role in every movie, I used to live or die by. Once I had these new outlets, I relaxed a lot more.
I read so much Harry Potter, that's, like, all I wanted to talk about. I watched stuff like 'Lizzie McGuire.' I watched things that were very mainstream but white, and I went to a predominately white school.
We moved 23 times before I was out of high school!
I didn't tell anyone in school that I was going to be in 'Skins.' I was terrified of them putting me down.
I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.
I was playing sports all the time, and my parents, Anne and John, encouraged me to play in grade school and high school.
I certainly was never the pretty girl at school, but I can go to a lot of different places with this face.
Do you know, every yoga school in India is free?
I think this is one of the greatest strengths of this school. Not only do the students go on to achieve great milestones in their own lives, they never forget their roots and the school that gave them the chance they needed to improve their lives and their families' lives.
I started off dancing and playing sports, and I joined the drama stuff, the theatre stuff in middle school because my friends were involved, and it was kind of the cool thing to do.
My school didn't have a drama department. I was one of the lucky four children who got to travel twice a week to another school because our school could only afford one taxi.
I used to be teased for the way I wore my hair at school. I used to do things like wear a different-colored sock on each leg.
It was quite a thespian - 'thespy' - sort of household. My mum had a dance school, and my dad now works in a theatre, so I spent a lot of time going to see dance as a young child - it was just a part of who we were.
One of the problems is that kids who don't read - who are not doing well in school - they know they're not doing well. And they want everyone to be in that same category.
If you feel your school is failing you, the question is why. Is it a lack of parental involvement, large classes, school violence, poor learning environment? Are there any standards to determine where problems are? Are there tutoring or mentoring programs? If the school is still failing after 3 years then what are your options?
When I came out of high school, my objective in life was to get a job selling used cars, but after trying for two weeks, nobody would hire me.
Cyberbullying isn't real. But bullying and harassment certainly are real. Trust me, friends, I went to school in England. They've got bullying down to a fine art. I know, because I was one of its chief architects. I was awful to my fellow schoolboys.
I had a real yearning to make use of the opportunities I had at school. When I heard about the gap year of teaching English at a Tibetan monastery, I knew I had to do something about it really quickly, otherwise it was going to get allocated.
I went to public school up until junior high.
It sounds like a cliche, but it... you do sing about what you know about. And I grew up in a small town, and I grew up in a place where your whole world revolved around friends, family, school, and church, and sports.
