actresses-from-chicago

"I like the tone of reality."

"I heard that you don't do favors for the mob but do you treat the devil the same?"

"I'm a mother and I have a life that's in my care and someone that looks up to me. That helps me see myself in a whole other light in a different way. It's a whole new world."

"I went from being an aunt, having a mom, and being a child to not having a mom, becoming a mom, and raising my own child."

"Well, I don’t really have time to do much [exercise], I just watch what I eat. I’m very careful and cautious of what I’m eating and I just try to place those meals throughout the day."

"I am at the weight I want to be, People are under the impression that I’m still losing but I’m not."

"That's exactly how Aretha would eat! That's exactly how she was.'" Hudson remembers. I loved having people around that knew her, to give notes or give the okay or chime in."

"I always like to say what men can't conquer, they like to destroy, I've learned, and that's something else that Mama Franklin taught me."

"More praise for the movie's headliner isn't hard to come by. Her voice is a weapon."

"Oh, I'm working with a singer who acts. I felt like I was working with a woman who truly knew how to tell a story, whether she was speaking or singing or just standing there feeling something."

"It's all about self-motivation because at the end of the day, you can have all the trainers and all the money in the world, but if you don't have that mindset, it's not possible."

"Stuff like this happens in your own home! I defy all the odds being African-American, living in a wealthy neighborhood and being a working mom. It’s too many foreign things in one person! It’s so ignorant. Race is just one of them. I face them all."

"It's like a brand new me, Sometimes I don't even recognize myself."

"...having to experience so much so soon, and then to have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, that's a lot. I can understand that."

"Chicago is home. Obviously, family, and it's all I know. I don't care where I go in the world, there is no place like home. Every time I come home, I get to come home to Chicago."

"When you pre­record you're married to that emotion, that delivery. I like the rawness, the honesty of being in the moment."

"We will continue to support Jennifer in maintaining her healthy lifestyle and wish her the very best in her personal and professional life."

"I never considered my decision as “walking away from Hollywood,” I felt it was more — walking into something more significant and by that, I took Hollywood with me. I really loved my work and the people I worked with."

"I love the idea of being American-Taiwanese. It's very specific to people who feel like they're from two different cultures. Because being American is something that we should be proud of. It's not something that needs to be defined in a certain way. This is our culture, too."

"Some of us don't want to admit to it, but we are a lot like our parents. The way that we are in our own personal relationships is very similar to how we grew up. And whether that's positive and negative, it's definitely something to be aware of."

"In middle school, I really longed to have a connection with my birth mom, and so I moved to Taiwan for four years and learned a whole new language and culture."

"As an Asian American, when you go to Asia, you sometimes feel like a foreigner even though you look like everyone else. I felt like the American coming in; my look was different, my feel was different."

"You know, I am one of those people where there wasn’t a moment growing up that I knew I wanted to be an actor—the truth was that I didn't know what I wanted to be at all. I wasn’t great at anything, I wasn’t an all-star athlete, great at playing the piano or the smartest kid in school but I liked creative things and watching Disney movies."

"The world will always have something against you, no matter how you look. I surround myself with people that hopefully as a group are doing good work for the culture. The reason I like to play different characters is that for so long Asian American actors have been in this stereotypical box."

"I wore my hair in those space buns for my audition, and the only reason why I did it was because I wanted to be someone totally different from who I am as a person."

"It’s a lot less consistent work, but I think with movies, you get to do such a huge range of emotions as a character, where as TV, you kind of stay on the same page. But I’d be happy with either"

"I try and do as much as I can in terms of giving my time when I have it cause it's like I get to live this life going new places, meeting new people and as hard as it is I mean I get an opportunity that a lot of people don't get to have so when I can do something and lend my time and make people happier or send a message and more people will see because I'm on TV. I mean, that's so key and I think everyone should keep that when there in a position like mine or definitely a position above mine. I mean you gotta give back I've been lucky enough to get so much that I have to give back. I don't know what I would do if I didn't give back so um, all those I mean any organization that's willing to lend time and really help people is so important and so great."

"It was a tool for me. I could express what I was feeling, whether it's good feelings or bad feelings. In that case it was bad feelings. But it was like all of a sudden, 'Who cares what Donald Trump or anyone else thinks of you?'"

"You know, I wasn't gonna wait around. And I thought, 'You know, what I'd like to do if I have my choice, I wanna go to Big Sur and go back to painting.' For better or worse, I left Hollywood. I let in very few people in my life, and I got involved with animals in my life. And not just cats and dogs. I had to learn who I was again through animals, because animals know who you really are."

"I don't keep up with anything that's said. If I paid attention to the good things, I'd have to pay attention to the bad things. I don't keep up with all that. It's better to just go along and do what you do. For a long time when I was in Hollywood, I did pay attention and it was confusing. It led you down a jagged path. It pulled you in one direction, then another direction. I would get off my focus. I had a hard time with boundaries."

"When you’re happy, you’re on a cloud higher than anybody can see. All of a sudden, the cloud turns grey and it starts putting pressure on you and before you know it you’re down at the bottom of the hole again."

"… It’s exciting to dress up in gorgeous clothes and to feel sexy and to look sexy. It’s wonderful, but it’s a trap. You become satisfied with that being enough, then later in life it isn’t enough. So many people, once they got older and were no longer looked at for their beauty, just fell apart"

"I wanted to be appreciated for what I was as a person and what I had to offer. I didn’t feel my work meant anything there. I knew I was a good artist and I wanted to express my feelings. Not the writer’s or the director’s; I wanted to express me. I wanted to play the role of somebody who was mentally ill. I think I could have done a really good job, because I knew those feelings."

"What I really liked about him was he never messed with my mind as far as interpretation. Bad directors would try to tell you how to think. That's so disruptive. It's just very disruptive unless you both come to an agreement on the character. Hitchcock was very precise about where he wanted you to stand. He never messed with your interpretation. It was wonderful. That gave you the freedom as a performer. I didn't agree with him about the costumes, but on the other hand, he let me express my views."

"I would just say hold out for what you believe in, and don't be afraid to express yourself. Don't let people try to change you, because in the long run, if you keep trying to do what everyone else thinks is right, it's not. You've got to do what you believe. Shakespeare was so right: 'This above all, to thine own self be true.’"

"[Vertigo] was before its time, really. I was not appreciated in my time. I think I'm appreciated more now. I'm glad to know that I'm still around to know that I'm more appreciated now."

"It happens in every marriage. My husband, whom I adored, wanted me to be more like how he wanted me to be. But I have too much of an independent personality. I’d be off painting and he wanted me to be more of a housewife…In Hollywood, they think they want you, but really they want what they want you to be."

"I live way out in the country, so there's not a lot of people around to remind me. And my friends don't think of me as `Kim Novak' anymore anyway. It's like they forgot, too. And so it's nice. I had a lot of resentment for a while toward Kim Novak. But I don't mind her anymore. She's okay. We've become friends. I even asked her before this trip for some beauty tips."

"I'm drawn to Kim Novak in the same way that Hitchcock was. She had an air of uptightness you wouldn't want to cross."

"I said, `I'm not going to change my family name.' Harry Cohn said, `Well, nobody's going to go see a girl with a Polack name.' I said, `Well, I'm Czech, but Polish, Czech, no matter, it's my name.'"

"I got so burned out on that picture that I wanted to leave the business, but then if you wait long enough you think, "Oh, I miss certain things." The making of a movie is wonderful. What's difficult is afterward when you have to go around and try to sell it. The actual filming, when you have a good script—which isn't often—nothing beats it."

"She was smart enough to leave as a big star and give everybody the finger – ‘I’m outta here!'"

"Your cinematic body of work speaks for yourself, but so does the other side of Kim Novak – the free spirit who left Hollywood to live atop the hills of Big Sur. Kim Novak the painter and llama farmer. You are an icon whose screen presence is unmatched, and yet you’ve lived your life with dignity and authenticity, and the courage to follow your heart wherever it takes you."

"I inherited my mental illness from my father, but the rape must have added to it…I ask how old she was and whether the rapist was known to her. “It was in my early teens by multiple boys in the back seat of a stranger’s car."

"When we participate actively in our lives and open our senses to all the stimuli around us, we build memories that can be retrieved and enjoyed the rest of our lives."

"For years, I was the girl whose idea of a gourmet meal was a pot of cheese followed by . I would think nothing of spending three days chipping away at a pound of Jarlsberg, eating no other food, and proudly calling it my “1,700-Calories-a-Day Diet”! […] I knew my health needed improving, so I started making changes. But nothing had quite the impact on my health like giving up cheese. In fact, I consider the day I gave up cheese forever—Wednesday, August 15, 1979—my true health birthday. […] When I gave up dairy, everything about me changed. My skin cleared, my cheeks de-puffed, my nose narrowed, my eyes brightened, my body streamlined."

"The reason why I fell in love with being a playwright and why I fell in love with theatre is because I grew up in it. My first poem was published at six and called “I Am Stronger than Hate.” I proclaimed then that, “I am stronger than hate, I will open the gate, the gate to a kingdom of love, it doesn’t matter what your race, or the color of your face. I am stronger than hate,” and of why I am a poet and playwright. This work is about community."

"I was like, “Man, young people in Chicago need to hear these young people in Ferguson articulate that, because that’s so powerful for young people to come to that political awakening on their own—outside of academia, outside of institutions that they’ve been denied access to.” And so we were really inspired to build with them. And we came back the next week and asked them if we could launch a pop-up gallery on their campsite. So we printed the photos that we had taken the week before, we brought down easels, and we created a pop-up gallery on the camp site—that was sort of the first gesture, the first portal of this loose collective of artists that would later become #LetUsBreathe, using art as an access point for political education and engagement, turning the Ferguson protest’s occupation into an art gallery…"

"My inspiration for this play derives from a combination of my personal and the collective grief around the mass shooting in the United States. These incidents made me pay attention to the National conversation around the topic of gun violence. On social media I constantly read “lone white shooter” and I started to think about the cycle of how news is dispersed, interpreted, re-dispersed and reinterpreted. This cycle is destructive. From this news, what assumptions do we make about the shooter? About the victims? And about the moments between gunshots?..."

"Chicago for me means life. I have lived in Chicago all my life. It keeps calling me back even though I have tried to escape. Chicago is a city filled with some of the most corruption and also some of the most courageous and successful organizing resistance overall. Chicago will always affect how I represent myself when I travel. It is home…"