A Quote by Christine Ebersole

My father started out as a riveter, but he had the soul of an artist. He worshiped Shakespeare and had aspirations to be an actor. He claimed that from the first day he laid eyes on me, I was going to be this great dramatic actress.
When I was doing Shakespeare and I had spent a lot of time and effort in trying to become a great Shakespearean actress. That was how I started my career, was in the theater doing Shakespeare. And my ambition was to be a great classical actress. That was what I wanted more than anything. So, I really pursued that in the first four years of my career. And it was an uphill struggle. It really was. Shakespeare's difficult and Shakespeare in a big theater is even more difficult. So, anyway, it was a struggle for me.
I've definitely become smuttier. When I first started out, I had these aspirations: 'I'm not going to do jokes about anything crude because I'm bigger and better than that.' But then, I don't know... It makes me laugh, so I started doing it.
I had started doing Bangladeshi films. You can say most of my aspirations of being an actor got fulfilled there but I also lost out as an actor here back home.
It was the first fight I had with my father. My father basically said, why are you going to business school? You're just going to get married and have kids and you won't use your degree. And it's expensive. We had a knockdown, drag-out fight, which was great. Yeah. In the driveway. My father said, 'You're on your own.'
We had a great dramatic society in school, and that's where I first got exposure both as an actor and director.
As part of my job, I got malaria really badly and was put in intensive care, and I had a hallucination because they give you this cocktail of drugs to fix you so you don't die, and I had this hallucination that I was at the Oscars and I won and I was a really good actress, and it was so real that when I came out of the hospital, I started saying to people I'm going to become an actress.
When I first started out in the music industry and went to Elektra Records, I didn't go to be an artist, I went to get a record label started. And they said in order to have a label deal, I had to be an artist - so that's what I did.
I got scouted for modeling, and it was really scary - I was walking my dog wearing heels for the first time ever because I had a party to go to the day after, and I wanted to practice, and this black car kind of started following me, so I, being dramatic, picked up the dog and started to run.
My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn't one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home.
The idea of going to the movies made Hugo remember something Father had once told him about going to the movies when he was just a boy, when the movies were new. Hugo's father had stepped into a dark room, and on a white screen he had seen a rocket fly right into the eye of the man in the moon. Father said he had never experienced anything like it. It had been like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day.
I was the first son and first child. When my sister came along, well, she was two years younger, and I had to go to the golf course because my mother couldn't handle all the action going on. So I came with father to the golf course since I was a year and a half old and I spent the day with him here, and it worked in naturally. And it was fun for me being with my father, and doing things that a kid did it was great.
I had forgotten how thrilling a snow day is until my son started school, and as much as he loves it, he swoons at the idea of a free day arriving unexpectedly, laid out like a gift.
"Rock Candy" was my first record. I had never been in a studio, so I was in shock and I had no idea if it was great or if it stunk. I was just putting in my heart and soul, and closing my eyes and keeping my fingers crossed. I gave it everything.
I wanted to be Dustin Hoffman or Robert De Niro or Al Pacino. I thought I was going to be a dramatic actor, but comedy sort of started out first, and I was like, 'Maybe I'll find some more drama later on in my career.'
When I first found out I had HIV, I had to find somebody who was living with it, who could help me understand my journey and what I was going to have to deal with day-to-day. I found out that a person named Elizabeth Frazier was living with AIDS at the time, and so I called her up, and she took a meeting with me.
I enjoy dramatic narration, of course, because I'm an actor and I started as an actor. But I love things that are a challenge, and I look forward to more work with that in the future. So there's always a sun coming up the following day for me.
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