A Quote by Poorna Jagannathan

The first time my parents found out I was acting was when a friend told them they had just come back from a play I was in. — © Poorna Jagannathan
The first time my parents found out I was acting was when a friend told them they had just come back from a play I was in.
Lee Strasberg told me I had talent. Real talent. It was the first time that anyone, except my father--who had to say so--told me I was good. At anything. It was a turning point in my life. I went to bed thinking about acting. I woke up thinking about acting. It was like the roof had come off my life!
We've always had a philosophy at Spurs to play out from the back, to play with style, to play out from the back and that's the way I've always been brought up and to come into the first team is no different.
The first time I ever heard the blues, my parents had a stack of records that they weren't using anymore. I found them when I was ten; I didn't know what it was. But I found Lightnin' Hopkins.
I had no idea what it took to be an actor. Then all of a sudden I found myself cast in a TV drama. The director was very harsh with me. One time, he told me this would be my first and last acting job. I seriously thought that acting was not the right career for me.
I'd just come out of drama school, didn't get anything, had to move back in with my parents and do a night-time cleaning job.
So when I told my parents I wanted to go into acting because I was flunking out of my first year of junior college, they were relieved that I had picked something other than joining the army. But I can't imagine how they had high hopes for me.
My first manager, Suzanne DeWalt, saw a play I was in. She was invited by the director Joan Scheckel, who was my first real acting teacher. Joan was also good friends with my friend Susie Landau Finch, who had first encouraged me to consider acting, so that's how I began studying.
I took my first acting class at age 6 because I found out that's what Carol Burnett was doing - acting. Also she had an imaginary friend as a kid and went to UCLA, two things we have in common. I will always admire her and hope one day, I can make someone laugh a fraction as hard as she's made me bellyache.
Acting is rare. You can be rehearsing Ibsen with Sir Richard Eyre and suddenly he has to take a call on his mobile telling him his friend Arthur Miller has died. Or you can come back from a job on the Isle of Man to be told by your agent you're going straight out to South Africa on another shoot. There's not even any time to wash your pants.
When I was young, I told my parents, 'I promise you I'm going to play in the Champions League, and for my first match, I'll invite you to come and watch me play.' Luckily, I was able to do that, and I was very happy. It was a moment of pride.
I dropped out in middle school. I dropped out in, towards the beginning of the ninth grade. And then I started studying -I started taking acting classes at a, well first I was like in a community theater at that time in Torrance, California, so I finished up like my season with that community theater just acting in, you know, acting in a small part on this play or a big part on that play or a stage manager or assistant stage manager in another play.
I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.
When I was 16 I took the first opportunity I had to play basketball in a different country. I flew to Europe for the first time and found myself in the small town of Macon, in France. That was the first time I lived far away from my people, from my culture. I was young and had to adapt quickly.
I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates.
My parents always knew that I wanted to act, so it didn't really come as a big surprise. The only thing they told me was that I had to wait until I was 18 so I could get my education out of the way first.
The Lord givith and the Lord takith away. I was given a lot of signs from the universe and looking at it in retrospect made me feel like God was telling me I needed to follow my dream. My granny getting in that car accident and being at that hospital when I was going there to see my girl... that whole part of the story where I go to the show and come back to the hospital... and it was almost like as soon as I found out that my granny didn't make it as soon as I got back, I also found out that my son had just come out.
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