My father was an ironworker who eventually co-founded a construction business. My mother, Jeanette, was a stay-at-home mom who had been an operating-room nurse until my older brother, Jimmy, was born.
I went to elementary school in L.A. I was born in L.A. My mother was from Redondo Beach. My father was French. He died six months before I was born, so my mother went home. I was born there. Not the childhood that most people think. Middle-class, raised by my mother. Single mom.
I was born at home in rural Kentucky, in 1942, in a house that my father Howard had built. He did most of the construction himself and built it on land that his father had given him when he married my mother Faye.
I literally didn't know my father. My mother had been a secretary, and after she and my father split, she went back to work for an advertising executive. So my older brother and I were "latch-door kids." We went home for lunch and after school by ourselves.
I was born Pauline Matthews and grew up in Bradford as one of three children - I had an older brother, David, and an older sister, Betty. My father Fred worked in the mills as a textile weaving supervisor, and my mother, Mary, was a housewife.
I've been acting since I was a little kid. It was my escape from my day which had to do with a father leaving, and a mother not being home, and her struggling and doing her best and all that. But it wasn't fun. I would go into theater class. If she were a stay-at-home mom, I wouldn't have that discomfort inside that kept me pushing.
My father's from Australia and my mother was born in India, but she's actually Tibetan. I was born in Katmandu, lived there until I was eight, and then moved to Australia with my mother and father. So yeah, I'm very mixed up, been to many different schools.
My dad was a plumber, and my mom was on and off again, either a stay-at-home mom or working with the disabled as a visiting-nurse assistant.
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 father was murdered when I was 12 years old. It was just me and my mother and my brother at the time. My brother was a little bit older than me and he left, so it was just me and my mom for a bit in Baltimore.
My mom was a singer, and my dad had been playing in bands with my mom's brother. My dad married my mom, and so I was sorta surrounded by music from the get-go. Born right into it.
I have three older brothers, and we all have different combinations of parents. My father was the best man at my mom's first wedding! And my brother's mother - my dad's first wife - is the sister to my mom's first husband's second wife. So my brothers are both stepcousins and stepbrothers. It's very '70s rock.
My father wasn't present, so my older brother felt like a father. He was only two years older than me so that was all I had.
My mother stopped working when she had my brother. She was a full time mom until I started getting heavily into ice skating lessons, and it got to the point where they really needed my mom to earn an income.
I had such a horrible childhood. My father was already married with three children when I was born and my mother didn't know. So we grew up poor. We had no hot water until I was 17. I went to work in a factory, and worked and saved for months until I had the money to come to England.
My mother was a single mom, and she was a claims adjuster at an insurance company. She actually dropped out of school - she was going to become a registered nurse - because she had to take care of me and my brother.
My mother was murdered by my step-father, my brother's father, who was also named Joel, twenty-five years ago. Whatever sadness or burden I've been living with since then, my brother's also been living with, but he's lived with the added burden of having the exact same name as our mother's murderer.