When I was growing up watching Marilyn Monroe, I learned that you can be very beautiful, very glamorous and very vulnerable and not give up your soul just because you were a movie star.
I loved all the other movies, and I loved all the other movie stars, but I was very aware of the fact that I didn't look like Marilyn Monroe - although I still wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. Then Josephine Baker popped up, and she wasn't the maid - she was the star of the show. To me, it was mind-blowing.
The women I liked when I was growing up, as a little boy, were Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, because they had these curvaceous figures, and they were erotic to me.
I can't stop watching 'Pan Am.' When I was growing up, my father worked as an engineer in Turkey, and we always flew Pan Am. The stewardesses were so glamorous! When they gave me a set of those golden wings, I felt very grown-up. Not only is the show's plot full of mystery and infidelity, they get the period details just right.
Growing up, I had my mom to look up to; J. Lo and Marilyn Monroe were notable curvy women. But I didn't have anyone with cellulite or back fat telling me they didn't care.
If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.
My mother and my two grandmothers, I was lucky to have three women around me growing up that were very special, very elegant women, very beautiful women. They were my first step into the beauty world, let's say, and then the fashion world, of course.
I was on the set when I was five years old with Spencer Tracy. A lot of what I learned growing up in terms of artistry is very clean, very tidy, very organized.
I did not grow up watching much TV and film. I had a very, very, very, very, very, very church family, and a lot of, like, secular stuff was not around my house.
I grew up in Louisiana, and I grew up with a dysfunctional family with some very serious abuse from my stepfather, who could be a very beautiful person on one hand and be terrible on the other, so it leaves your soul troubled as a child.
I remember writing 'The One I Can't Have' at the kitchen table. I was looking at a picture of Truman Capote with Marilyn Monroe and that's where I started. It doesn't make any sense because he was gay, but it was just the idea of the short guy and the beautiful blonde out of his league. That's where I started, but very quickly it became about me.
I wouldn't say no to becoming a Bond girl. Making it in Hollywood has been my dream ever since I was little, watching Marilyn Monroe movies. To star in a Bond movie would be bliss on a stick.
I loved the movies and I wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe. I thought she was so glamorous and everyone seemed to love her. I wanted to be like that and I told everyone I would be the next Marilyn Monroe.
Europe is a very different place from my native country of Colombia and my children are growing up in a very urban setting which is nothing like when I was growing up and would be able to play barefoot in the street. But we have a very good life.
Growing up, my parents were very, very strict. And then I went to UCLA with John Wooden, who was just off the charts.
I love curvy women. Maybe because I'm not. I would love to be a Marilyn Monroe, but I'm very far away from that... So I love very curvy girls.
I don't want to be Marilyn Monroe. In many ways, that's a good comparison. Because Marilyn Monroe was a sexpot, all that stuff that I have no interest in. For me, it's much easier to just try to make people laugh than to try to be the hottest thing in the world.