I was not a girl who grew up buying $100 candles. I was the girl who ran out of gas on her way to an audition.
I went to an all-girls' Catholic school for, like, six years during the time when kids actually had handwriting class. I've always had a propensity for getting the cursive down pretty well.
I will always find my light. No question. And if I don't, I'll know, because my dad will be the first person to call me and say, like, 'You need to have him bring another 2K in,' and 'Why aren't you using this sort of lighting gel?' The crew guys know that it's where I grew up.
If I have to do a red carpet, and there is a whole team, then it is an hour with the hair and make-up. But if I am just going out with friends, it is 15 minutes max in front of the mirror. A quick five minutes on my face, and I always wear my hair up.
I'm a California girl, right? I grew up with that farm-to-table dining before it was sweeping the nation.
I'm consistently asked how I keep a foot in two contrasting worlds - one in the entertainment industry, predicated on wealth and indulgence, and the other in humanitarian work. To me, it's less of a question of how can you do this, and more a question of how can you not?
I'm from L.A., so I'm used to seeing people in sunglasses and flip-flops. There's something so romantic about a man in a scarf and a knitted hat.
It was the late '70s when my parents met. My dad was a lighting director for a soap opera, and my mom was a temp at the studio. They moved into a house in The Valley in L.A., to a neighborhood that was leafy and affordable.
I've had dates at the nicest restaurants, but when you leave, you're starving, and the best part of the date is having a slice of pizza and a couple of drinks on the way home. I think it's important to be able to roll with the punches and enjoy every minute of it.
Just as black and white, when mixed, make grey, in many ways that's what it did to my self-identity: it created a murky area of who I was, a haze around how people connected with me. I was grey. And who wants to be this indifferent colour, devoid of depth and stuck in the middle? I certainly didn't.
My mother was a free-spirited clinical therapist, and I had the most hard-working father, a television lighting director by trade. My mum raised me to be a global citizen, with eyes open to sometimes harsh realities.
There is a myth that those who do humanitarian work have a saviour mentality, but the relationship is reciprocal.
Traveling gives you some perspective of what the rest of the world is like. I think that having the courage to step out of the norm is the most important thing.
When I get ready to go out, it's half hour and we're out of the door. I don't want to waste time getting ready: I want to go and have fun.
While my life shifts from refugee camps to red carpets, I choose them both because these worlds can, in fact, coexist. And for me, they must.
I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn't want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn't supposed to be able to draw - isn't that wonderful - so I made up a false name.
I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.
I practiced drawing all the time and became very interested in it. If I was at a meeting that wasn't getting anywhere - like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department - I would draw the other people.
I was a very shy character, always feeling uncomfortable because everybody was stronger than I, and always afraid I would look like a sissy. Everybody else played baseball; everybody else did all kinds of athletic things.
I was terrible in English. I couldn't stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention - it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.
I've always been very one-sided about science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it.
The original reason to start the project, which was that the Germans were a danger, started me off on a process of action, which was to try to develop this first system at Princeton and then at Los Alamos, to try to make the bomb work.
Connect with
Login with Facebook