Fred Astaire told me things I will never forget. Gene Kelly also said he liked my dancing. It was a fantastic experience because I felt I had been inducted into an informal fraternity of dancers, and I felt so honored because these were the people I most admired in the world.
I was shaped by the heroes in the films I saw, which you always want to emulate and be like. I wanted to be like Alan Ladd, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart.
It's like Christians who want to be like Jesus. We're just trying to follow in someone's footsteps. Might as well be The Beatles.
I went to California at a perfect time... when many of those people that I had admired so much in films were not working that much. They had free time on their hands to talk to... me, and they liked me because I knew so much about them.
I'd like to go for people I admire - I always gravitate towards the people I idolized when I was a teenager: Cher, Diana Ross, and David Bowie.
I never tire of the heroes that I knew growing up.
Now, I guess, people want stars. People are trying to invent stars.
I don't have any idols, any heroes, nothing, no.
Celebrity is seen by a huge amount of people and certainly myself for a while as the pinnacle of society, of success. It is revered almost religiously, both the institution and its quickly growing member base.
When I was young, I was looking for people to look up to - role models I could respect.
You know, I often thought that the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They're admired and hero-worshipped but there is always present underlying desire to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.
Celebrity culture is an aspirational culture regardless of how much you don't want it to be.
As children, we look up to people, for better or worse, and see them as the standard for how we should act and identify ourselves.
The biographies are very enlightening because you realise, "Oh my God, all these people I’ve admired - and tried to emulate even - when I was younger died tragically from substance abuse.
I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.
Happily, I had lots of childhood heroes.
I think there's something basically wrong with the general public that they do need their icons.
Never had any idols, ever. I never had any posters, nothing.
And I loved Frank Lloyd Wright. I think he was the greatest man I have ever met in my life.
I can't picture myself being the people I always looked up to.
Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.
I never really think of anyone as models, even the models.
Like all children, I spent a lot of time looking for idols.
There never was a great truth but it was reverenced; never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind.
When I was 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, I had so many people I looked up to and was so inspired by all these different people. It's cool to be in that position.
