A Quote by Melissa Leo
I know what it meant to me to play the Reverend Mother, a role I've, in some ways, prepared a lifetime to do. It's why I took the part.
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I always wanted to play a nun, and to play the Reverend Mother was a thrill of a lifetime for me. But, generations back, my family were not churchgoers, which is an unusual thing in the United States.
I didn't know what it meant or what it took to be healthy and be prepared for 82-plus games... Injuries come with sports. I know that. But you can be prepared, get your body as prepared as it can be through practice and weights.
I got the role of a lifetime in Rajinder Singh Bedi's 'Phagun' in 1973. I had to play Jaya Bachchan's mother. That did it for me. I was suddenly flooded with mother's roles.
I took the role of Rochelle in 'Everybody Hates Chris,' and that was it. I was going to play mother roles all the time. Once you do one mother role, it's always a trickle down effect.
I think that, when you play a mother, whether you play a bad mother or a not so great mother or an amazing mother, being a mother is already so complicated. It's already three-dimensional, automatically, no matter what the role is, because you're playing a mother.
The thing that scares me is that some part of me understands where they're coming from. They took everything from us, you know? Why shouldn’t we be able to take it back if we have the power to?
I know in the Christian church the old ladies use to say "what the devil meant for bad God meant for good." So some of the things that I think they went out and tried to be detrimental to my life saved me in a lot of ways.
My sister is not my mother, but more than anyone else, she fills that role for me now - like it or not. And indeed, all women I know play that role for somebody - like it or not.
A role I grew up with and always loved was James Bond. I'd even say, in some ways, that he served as a creative role model for me as a kid in terms of roles I would want to play. I watched all of the movies growing up with my dad, so to be Bond himself would, without a doubt, be my dream role.
I don't know why it took me some time to get used to the ways of this industry because I have realized that out here when people want to pull you down they really pull you down.
Shifting toward management meant greater responsibility and influence, but it also meant giving up programming day-to-day in my role, which was hard because it took me out of my comfort zone.
I wanted to play a mother again. I thought it would be interesting to play the mother of an older child. And it was also the kind of part I've been looking for my whole career, actually, in film. You know, just to play a femme fatale who's very smart, and wicked.
When you say Sharia, even to a Muslim, it's understood in vastly different ways, in many ways it's part of an identity and most Muslims when they talk about wanting Sharia to play a role in their lives really mean it in so far as it talks about family law, you know, issues like, as I said marriage, divorce.
The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself.
My mother really didn't come from artists. Her famous quote to me was, "The only artists I've ever heard of are dead." The pottery classes were meant to be a part of my overall uplift. I knew what it meant to be sent to art classes, but I still didn't know anything about being an artist.
Neil [Simon] was considered our greatest [living playwright] at the time [of their marriage]. Maybe he still is; I don't know. But anyway, he was hugely successful, and I just kind of got folded into that. And in some ways, he protected me, but in other ways, I wasn't fully able to step out, you know? He didn't want me to go away so much. The work that we did together was great, and I don't regret it, but what I am saying is that I didn't get an opportunity to explore some other areas that were offered to me early on. I took what I might call a U-turn.
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