Jennifer Jason Leigh Quotes

Some people had fathers who were bankers or farmers, my father made films, that's how I saw it. As for the movie stars, they were just around, some of them were friends, others weren't, it was all just a part of my everyday life.

I did a lot of acting when I was a child. I was very shy - the kind of kid who ran into a corner and cried on parents' visiting day.

I didn't realise my upbringing was unusual until my teens. As the child of two actors, I presumed that visiting film sets and being surrounded by colourful characters was normal.

I started acting when I was, like, three. My brother was really smart, and he wasn't being challenged enough, so my mom put him in the theater class. And I obviously followed him.

Believe it or not, I was a pretty shy youngster growing up.

I didn't grow up, really, in the film business, even though my parents are both artists. I grew up in New York City. They would never put me into acting. I just kind of wanted it, and I told them that.

I started when I was four because I had asked my parents, I begged them, 'Can I do acting? I really want to do this!' and they let me do it, so that's pretty much how I got started.

My whole family are in the entertainment industry. It is always something I was used to; I was quite lucky growing up. To all my friends, it was quite exciting, but to me it was quite normal.

When I was a kid, I was really quiet.

I was very shy as a kid, but films fascinated me a lot. I think every North Indian kid wants to grow up to become an actor at some point. I hail from a small village in Punjab.

I'd like to be an actress when I'm older. I sometimes do improv. I used to do it with my dad.

I had parents who were working actors, who did really well in their careers, but it was a living. So it was a reality for me growing up; it wasn't a fantasy. It wasn't sitting there going, "I want to be adored." It wasn't that at all. Not to say that the screams of fans aren't a smile-raiser, but that was never the pull for me.

I can't really remember my life without movies... [Growing up in Hollywood] is no different really. I make movies the same way other kids play tennis or go to piano lessons. I'm trying to get better at what I want to do, just like other kids are trying to get better at what they want to do.

I think so much of what informs us as performers is what we had to endure as kids growing up. I was the youngest in my family. I always got a lot of attention.

I wanted to be an actor because it gave me the opportunity to express myself in ways I wasn't comfortable expressing myself, as a kid growing up in St. Louis.

I think by default I wanted to be an actor because, on a movie set as a little kid, the only thing that you can do is be an actor. And I was really enthralled by the whole process.

Growing up, I was the weird, theatrical kid who always tried to make people be in my plays. I've always loved comedy, but when it came time to figure out what I was going to go to school for, my parents were like, "Acting?! I don't think so. No." It took me a while to get the courage to pursue it. I had to do it in secret for a little bit, and then when I got married and was out on my own, I went for it.

What do little kids do? They crawl on the floor and they build with blocks. I just continued to do that for the rest of my life.

Growing up as a mixed-race kid myself, when you are in the middle of it and you're young...you don't think about it consciously. It's your reality.

I was born because it was a habit in those days, people didn't know anything else ... I was not a Child Prodigy, because a Child Prodigy is a child who knows as much when it is a child as it does when it grows up.

I did act as a kid, but I quit when I was seventeen.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor. I was acting in all the school plays. I went to school for acting. I was really sure that that's what I wanted to do.

I had a very close relationship with another kid when I was growing up. I was his imaginary friend.

As a kid growing up, this was sometimes a little bit intimidating to have a mom who was always, like, speaking up and always saying something that might be kind of controversial . . . . The thing I think that we got out of that that was really good was, like, we weren't afraid to make waves.

When I was a kid growing up in New York, I was pretty unaware of racism. I think when we're young - before we lose our innocence - we're sort of unaware of the more flawed qualities of each other.