There are actually no political aspirations. I think you need to have the right attitude and aptitude for it. I don't think I have the right aptitude for it. I think it is unfair to push somebody in that direction just because my father happens to be a politician.
One thing I was told early in my career is when you walk out on the field, the name on the back of your jersey is not yours - it's your dad's. I've carried that with me forever as something - I've worked harder and learned more about my father since he passed than when he was alive, because when he was alive, I was young, and I knew everything.
For me, my father was a pastor, and my parents are still together. They raised me, you know, to be respectful.
My mother and father definitely encouraged me. People used to tell my mom that I should be in commercials, and then everything kicked off from there, and my first gig was some print work.
My father used to say to me, 'The only limit to your success is your own imagination.' I actually believed that - like, I'm still coming to terms with the fact that I might not be an Olympic figure skater.
I come from a very humble background. My father had to work really hard to become an assistant director. For a large part of his youth, he worked in a mill and took up odd jobs to make ends meet. We lived in a small room and could only afford a meal a day.
My parents lived a modest life, and their main concern was the education of their children. My father was a self-taught man but had a great intellectual curiosity, not only for biblical and talmudic texts, but also for philosophy, psychoanalysis and history.
The prospect of being a father made me ask myself a question. How do you know what kind of adult your child will turn out to be? And how much can you control that?
When I was ten years old, my family left a cold, damp prefab in West Fife and moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where my father quickly found work at what was then the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks.
To do a studio film, something with Disney. My father is thrilled.
Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower.
My father was very interested in music, and when he and his brothers were young, they had a singing group that used to open for Sam Cooke. There was always music in our house, but there wasn't much art around.
To be honest, I think I'd become a bit selfish with memories of my father. I wanted to hug them close to me.
I was an only child of a father who loved me deeply, but we didn't play catch, even though I was an athlete. We didn't go fishing or hunting or any of the things I wanted to do. Why not? He just didn't do that.
When I was four years old, my father, who was a colonel in the army, was stationed in Salzburg, Austria. Across the street from our house was an ancient castle on a cliff. So when I first heard fairy tales, I felt as if the magic of 'Cinderella' or 'Sleeping Beauty' was taking place right in my own neighborhood.
I grew up listening to my father argue politics into the night and taking trips every Saturday to the Hood River library where my mother maintained her interest in reading and encouraged the same from her sons.
I'm a full-blooded Mexican. My mother was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and my father - the son of Mexican immigrants - was born near Fresno, California.
One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man.
You know the things I went through as a youngster, coming into the business, all the good, the bad and the ugly that came. I'd had a rough life. I grew up single parent. My mom, she was like a father to me.
My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.
To play my father, his struggles, and how he overcame it all would require you to bring tears to my eyes. It has to be one of his sons. And we're not, none of us, in Hollywood.
My mother Diana was a true-blue aristocrat, descended from William the Conqueror and listed in 'Burke's Peerage.' My father David, from a poor Scottish family, was a doctor.
I tell my kids, 'I'm your father, not your friend - but I'm also the best friend you're ever going to have because no one is going to care for you the way I care about you.'
The tradition of putting candles on Christmas trees actually began in Germany. The person who came up with the idea is thought to have been Martin Luther, father of the Reformation.
I was told bedtime stories by my father or my grandmother. Books, I mostly read on my own in bed.
My first failure was to be born a child not wanted by his father or mother, as they parted shortly after I was born.
My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor.
My character Esteban is a guy who really didn't think he was gonna be there at this point in his life. He's in his early 30s. He's got a son. He's raising his son as a single father.
My father passed away when I was 12, so it was very difficult. But I was always the class clown. I don't know why - maybe as an escape. But then I was sent away to military prep school.
My father and my uncle used to be amateur monologuists because their generation grew up with Henry Irving and the like, and they had that style of delivery, of declamation: 'The Belllllls!' What we call 'ham' now, larger than life.
It's not that my father didn't love me, it's just that he wasn't capable of consistently being there. His mood swings were gigantic.
I was forced to lie to my father by doctors and relatives. I made that choice and agreed with them, and I will never, ever get over it. If I hear a lie in my life with my children, with my wife, my work, my audiences, I want to annihilate myself, vaporize myself, and wipe myself off the face of the earth.
My husband has a cousin who discovered, in his fifties, that the man he thought was his father was actually not, and that he had not only a father he had never met, but brothers.
There I am, watching Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of my favourite actors in the world, walk into the room dressed up as Father Christmas, being hilarious, and I'm suddenly thinking, 'Where am I?'
At 9 years old, I moved in with my father because my mother could no longer care for me. Looking back, I now see so many similarities between my own childhood and that of my sons. My father stepped in when I needed him, and that gave me the chance for a better life. That's what I'm doing for my boys now.
I think my father couldn't wait to get home to his wife, but I don't know if he was so keen on us children.
