A Quote by Marissa Jaret Winokur

I was 27, an unemployed actress living in a really crappy studio apartment. I had just moved to Los Angeles alone, away from my family. I had cervical and uterine cancer and I was told that I would never be able to carry a baby.
I had family and friends back home. Just because I could potentially feel alone in Los Angeles, that didn't mean I was alone.
I had achieved so much success in my career and then had this spectacular fall from grace that left me unemployed and living in a town, Los Angeles, that is built on envy. Once you fall, people don't really root for you to come back again. I'd go to restaurants where I always had the best table and half the time they wouldn't even let me pay. And then when I stopped making movies, the same places wouldn't even give me a lousy table, never mind the best one!
I never pictured myself in California. I just thought I would be a character actress in New York on the stage. I never really had that stardom goal; I just wanted to be able to work as an actress and not as a waitress.
And last, my mom. I don’t think you know what you did. You had my brother when you were 18 years old. Three years later, I came out. The odds were stacked against us. Single parent with two boys by the time you were 21 years old. Everybody told us we weren’t supposed to be here. We went from apartment to apartment by ourselves. One of the best memories I had was when we moved into our first apartment, no bed, no furniture and we just sat in the living room and just hugged each other. We thought we made it.
Honestly, in the beginning, it was really tough. Coming from Cincinnati, Ohio, I was just a girl who had a dream, which was to go to Los Angeles, have a career and to be able to support my family. To have a dream like that and, you know, you're not ready.
I have cervical cancer. I'm what they call a DES baby... I have been cancer free for 7 years now... I had it the first time when I was 19 and then it came back a few years later after I went through treatment.
When I moved to Los Angeles, aged 54, I printed out Winston Churchill's phrase, 'Never, never, never give up', and stuck it on my fridge. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I knew I had to keep on going.
When I started, I was a theater actress, and there were roles that I couldn't imagine not playing, like Rosalind in 'As You Like It.' I used to think I would die if I could play that. But then I started doing movies, and I had children, and I moved to Los Angeles. And now I kind of can't remember what those roles would be.
I've always had a love affair with New York City, and I've threatened to get an apartment there one day. But it just made sense for me to set 'Burlesque' on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. It's a place I know intimately well and love, and I think there's a great story to be told with L.A.
I moved to Los Angeles when I was about 20, all by myself. It was exciting. I had this moment when I felt like I needed to put on my big-boy pants and just make that leap to see what would happen.
I moved to Los Angeles in January 2004 because a buddy of mine, who I met at a friend's wedding, said he could get me a room in his apartment for $500 a month. I took it thinking that it would probably only be about six months before I moved back to Chicago, but I fell in love with it.
I think that New York liberated me in the sense that I moved here when I was 18, so it was a fresh perspective on life. I had been living in L.A. my whole life and I had never lived anywhere else, so being away from family and really making a name for myself was huge for me.
California always had been a dream to me. I guess growing up in the 70s with movies like Vanishing Point, The Getaway, and Badlands formed the need for me to leave Germany for California. I'd never even visited before I moved there. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1996 right away I felt at home. Everything was in place and the dream was alive.
I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it's sort of crappy now. It's always just you and the page. That doesn't change.
I moved from Chicago to New York in 1984 for 'Biloxi Blues.' In 1989, my wife and our then-baby daughter moved to Los Angeles to try to get in television.
Los Angeles has been great to me, and I have a home there, and I'm so lucky I get to do what I do for a living. But I did not go down to Los Angeles really even with the intention of staying.
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