My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then there was my twin brother and my sister. We had two aunts as well, my father's sisters. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me.
My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.
I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family, there's lots of children, seven brothers, two sisters grew up together, fighting with each other, went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.
I have two sisters. My father is Greek and comes from a family of seven. My mother is English and comes from a family of five.
When I was a child at sixteen, I was just a child. All sixteen year-olds are just children. As much as we like them to be adults, they are just children. And like all children, they need their mother, and they need their father. All children need their mother and their father. All children are entitled to their mother and their father.
In humans, the family prevents infanticide. Next to language, the core family, consisting of a mother, a father and children, is the greatest difference between us and other primates.
Children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother.
In one family, all goes by two and two. If a member of it has any interest, he or she will confide it to some one other; but the rest know nothing. In another family, all feel what touches one; nothing is kept dark from the father and mother, brothers and sisters--all share. This family habit is by far the better, it strengthens the tie between the members, and makes the home one home.
My mother's parents, Bernard and Rivka Levine, were from Russia and also immigrated to New York City. My mother, Rose, was the elder of their two daughters. My maternal grandmother's family included several scholars and professionals.
We're travelling through space and time, we're dealing with gods and monsters, but at the heart of the film, from my perspective, is a family - a father, two sons, two brothers, a mother and the fractious, intimate interaction that they have.
There were nine children in my father's family and eight in my mother's. My grandparents did the best with what they had. After the Depression, they were scratching out a living and working hard. They kept the family going.
In 1999 my father died and my mother was coming to live with me. So I left my Kennington flat and bought a house with a garden because my mother loved watching the birds.
There's a family tradition of fighting in the Kansas City Golden Gloves. My older brother, Tim, did, and so did my father's two youngest brothers, Trent and Troy. They all won the Golden Gloves. So when my mother asked me to keep the tradition going, I did.
My mother and father were farmers from very humble means, and when I was three years old they moved from the roca to the city to try to give us a better life. My father took a job at a winery and my mother worked as a seamstress.
London does two things for me: it makes me feel connected, and it also makes me feel very isolated and quite lonely at times, and that's someone with two children in their family.
My mother's family came from the British West Indies. And my father's family came from, well, my father's father came from the Montana/South Dakota area. They were Blackfoot Indian.