My parents don't have any showbusiness links. They are so far away from it.
I grew up as normally as any other kid. Between that small TV part I did at five and when I turned professional actor at 18, I stayed away from the limelight, so I was just like any typical kid who went to school.
When I was a kid, I didn't collect stamps, or weird toys, or anything. I don't even have music - I don't even have a CD collection. So that's not really my thing.
I'm not the pedigree kid. I'm not classically trained. I didn't come from the fancy home, no.
I think a lot of people think I was born in a blue suit, on the David Brinkley show. And that isn't me. I am much more that kid who grew up in South St. Louis, in a very modest household, with a simple background with parents who didn't get through high school.
I didn't grow up in public life. I lived with my mother in Boston, not in Washington, DC, so I was somewhat sheltered from that.
I am not from any acting background, not from any film family.
I'm not from an acting family. I'm from a working class family.
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 had a very normal childhood, and my mother cooked very normal food.
My dad was a musician, it was just what he did, like another guy's dad drives a meat truck. Our house was normal. We weren't taken with the fact our dad was a musician.
I came from a very normal, un-Hollywood background. My parents provided me with every sort of normal upbringing that they could.
When I was growing up, I didn't do plays in downtown Boston, and my parents weren't putting me in auditions. They never thought, Oh, she has a gift! They never thought of me as an entertainer when I was a young kid.
My mom cooked pot roast with noodles and frozen vegetables. Or she'd make spaghetti or hot dogs, or heat up TV dinners. Before I started modeling at age 19, I was 5'8" and weighed 165 pounds.
It was a perfectly average well- adjusted childhood, not a bit unlike that of millions of other individuals.
None of my family had been entertainers. My Grandad liked to play 'The Ballad of Davy Crockett' on the comb and tissue paper every now and again but we never had Hughie Green knocking on the front door.
Our kids haven't any airs about them. I don't like posh kids who don't like dirty dolls or expect a chauffeur every time they go out.
... People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls.
My background is not typical of a lawyer or a DPP. My dad was a toolmaker before he retired, so he worked in a factory all his life.
