A Quote by Brendan Dooling
I grew up in Bellport, Long Island where I attended Gateway Acting School and met Robin Allan. She was the school's director who took me under her wing and was the one who told me that I could do this for real.
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I wouldn't be an actor if it weren't for the English teacher I had my junior year in high school. She's the one who told me I could be an actor. I had never met an actor, I had never seen a real play, only high school plays. I didn't know actors were real, that it was a real job.
The casting director on the movie made me aware of her. She told me what to watch Starter For Ten, which I did and thought she was great in. She was just so charming and beautiful. But I felt she could probably look plain if we tried. And when I subsequently met with her, I was so charmed by her vulnerability and sweetness. Those were two qualities that were the most important for that character.
You got to miss class to do it. Like, many periods of school. And then they took us to an elementary or middle school, and we told kids that they could be cool when they grew up even if they didn't do drugs.
Public school teachers in Long Island, New York, saved my life in the '70s. They were involved and invested and helpful. One took me into her family and loved me back to life. She taught me that love is not formed and families are not formed by blood. That love makes a family.
My first heartbreak was extreme. I went to Australia for 10 months when I was at school and told the girl I was madly in love with not to come out to see me - and of course, when I came back, she met me at the airport to tell me she'd met someone else.
My mother grew up in abject poverty in Mississippi, an elementary school dropout. Yet, with the support of women around her, she returned to school and graduated as class valedictorian - the only one of her seven siblings to finish high school. She became a librarian and then a United Methodist minister.
Once, Naseeruddin Shah told me that the wafer shop was the best acting school that I could have attended. And I completely agree. I observed every customer very minutely and picked up some quirk or the other. Later, I used those experiences while playing different characters.
I had to go to see the careers woman at school, and when she asked me what I wanted to do after school, I told her flat: 'I want to be a professional footballer.' I can remember her being silent for a few seconds, just looking at me.
I took Kira to a nice dinner at a place called Moonshadows in Malibu, which is by the ocean, and I organized it so a school of young dolphins swam by our table. I took her for a long walk on the beach after dinner, and I told her all the things I love about her. Then I asked her to marry me.
My mom is from Jamaica and she was going to school in the morning, and in the evening she was working, and at night she would go to night school and then come in and go to sleep. So she would never watch the news and stuff like that and she didn't know what crack was. She didn't know nothing about it, but when I told her I was selling crack, she threatened to kick me out of the house. And then I just started paying for stuff - paying her bills and giving her money, so she'd just tell me to be careful because there was nothing she could do to stop it.
I grew up in a family in which no male upstream from me had ever finished high school, much less gone to college. But I was taught that even though there was nothing I could do about what was behind me, I could change everything about what was in front of me. My working poor parents told me that I could do better.
My wife is a writer. She grew up in Alaska. She told me she was moving to Boulder and that I could come with her if I wanted to. We were married at the time, so I chose to come with her.
Many years ago, my neighbor told me that his daughter is very brave and she never cries. I was surprised. So, I took it up as a challenge. I met her and sat next to her, staring at her straight in the eye for a few minutes.
I think my parents wanted me to do something very normal, have a normal person job and not be confronted by the instability of an artistic pursuit, but there wasn't really a lot they could do to stop me. I was, at one point, going to go to law school when I finished high school, but the next day I got accepted into acting school and there was no real question in my mind of what I was going to do.
When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.
My mother smokes me out. We'll get these long periods of me thinking I'm too busy to call her up or e-mail her, and she'll send me something. My mom's a real whiner. I love her to death, but she always sends me these 'woe is me' things. I think she might be Jewish. I'm not sure. She's Baptist-Jewish, which is a double whammy.
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