Actresses From The United States

"I was a nerd! I was president of my science fiction club. Doesn’t get any nerdier than that. I took Latin — that’s pretty nerdy. And theater. I was a trainer for our football team. I got into the boy’s locker room that way, ha! I loved being in high school. I had a boyfriend all through high school. I was friends with all different kids in different clubs. A floater!"

"Being Buddhist, I do believe we are reincarnated. Our spirit goes back into the celestial forces and we come back based on how well we’ve treated others — whether we come back better or in worse forms."

"I think, definitely with this business, it was part luck, part timing, and maybe some destiny. I think we’re all destined for something. So I’m just very grateful, I’m always extremely grateful for any job that comes along and any dreams that can come true. Because it’s a really tough business, especially if you’re a woman, and especially if you’re an ethnic woman, and especially now, if you’re an older woman. So I’m always very, very grateful."

"The whole reason why we’re in this business is to please our fans. When I go to conventions, I see the reactions of women and men alike, and some girls actually shake and cry when they tell me stories about how much Mulan has influenced their lives and had such a strong impact in their lives. It’s profoundly moving for me. So I think it is important to not just gain new fans with the live-action adaptation, but really pay tribute to the fans that have been around for so long with the film and now have passed it on down to their kids and their families."

"I really think as long as you have a good story that relates to a lot of people it doesn't matter what ethnicity it is."

"I love doing TV. It's so great for my world as a mom, as someone who likes to have a steady job and go to work feeling secure because I'm with a family."

"Mom takes all the credit for my success. Now Mom says, 'I read your face when you were a baby, and it said you were going to be a star. That's why I named you Ming - because it's all about the sun and the stars and enlightenment.'"

"That's what was so amazing about Mulan. Here is this story with all Chinese characters, and yet so many people related to her character and loved the story. So I really think as long as you have a good story that relates to a lot of people, it doesn't matter what ethnicity it is."

"I'm not one of those actresses that's going to feel like I never achieved my dreams and goals and just get disgruntled and hate everything about the business. I've had so much fun."

"I used to pray to god, Buddha, and the Force because that’s how much a belief it was for me. It was a religious experience for me. No small thing! No small connection there… I’ve been part of the [fandom] family for so many decades that now to actually be in the family is pretty crazy."

"I’ve kicked six stuntmen in the bollocks, hit someone over the back with a lead pipe and launched an iron chair at an assistant director. All completely by accident. When it comes to stunts I have a lot of confidence and little skill."

"I worked with kids at risk to help them get back in school and stay out of trouble."

"It is a La Raza effort, the city and the people made this story happen."

"I wanted to start an artistic revolution to empower our neighborhood and people."

"It was a project for those who believed in us, a movement that started in the streets and out of poverty, humility and esteeming those who are viewed a less."

"For me, if you are a unique singer-songwriter, just go somewhere and play. Play in a club, coffee shop, the street, just get out there and play. There is nothing like the experience of being in front of people, getting them to watch you play live, and receiving feedback. All that is so important. Recording yourself in a bedroom and putting it on YouTube is just not going to get you a record deal. Although, there is always that story where it does because they have three million views. Then you have to back it up with your talent, and you have to have the experience."

"There are two different groups of fans. Those who come to the horror conventions are obsessed with Halloween and Carrie. The most surprising thing for them is they look at my other pictures and say, "oh yeah, you were in Stripes!" A lot of them know I was in all those films, but a lot of them don’t know. If I just meet someone on the street, or their head turns at a check-out line, they usually say, "did I go to high school with you?""

"You laugh a lot on a horror film. Because you get strangled, and someone yells “cut” and everyone starts laughing on the set. But comedy, it’s different because everyone is trying to figure out what is going to get the most laughs so when someone yells cut there’s a lot of “well, maybe this would be funnier” or “the stunt guys didn’t laugh that hard that time, so let’s try something else.” It’s very different."

"The most important thing was making sure she came across as a human being. We can all have many different sides, some that ask more of you in terms of identity than others. For me, I didn’t want her accent or her disability to be the most interesting things about her, but I did look into some real life female activists and took a lot of inspiration from those amazing women. I was also inspired by Flannery O’Connor; I grew up in Louisiana and you would always see pictures of her with her canes, as she suffered from Lupus, but continued doing amazing work."

"…as an actor, I never am attracted to just playing a physicality or a bit – just having a disability or an accent or something isn’t attractive to be because it can kind of be like a party trick. When you’re dealing with a character who’s disabled, that’s somebody’s life. That’s somebody’s reality, so you need to treat it with a lot of respect and profundity and not to turn it in to a gimmick, like a ‘bit’..."

"… it is a character that is potentially provocative, but I don’t think that it was intended that way. That comes in with whatever baggage the audience brings in to the movie-viewing experience… There have been so many other movies where an Asian character has been under-served or just been sort of a background character…"

"…When you have that sort of background, being an actor in Hollywood is like the wildest, most far-fetched occupation that you can think of and I kind of fell into acting because I was initially interested in writing when I was younger and I went to college initially thinking that I was gonna major in creative writing and that didn’t work out. I ended up studying film instead because I thought it was also another form of storytelling…"

"I was just walking across the street . . . this guy [a porn producer] stops and he gets out his car and he gives me his card, and I thought about it for about two weeks. Then you made the mistake of saying yes and going in and . . . yeah, I did it for about three months, and as soon as I started to gain popularity, that's when I was like, "OK I need to get the F out of here, this is not what I was trying to do whatsoever." I just wanted to let loose and rebel."

"Women's rights in Lebanon are a long way from being taken seriously if a Lebanese American porn star that no longer resides there can cause such an uproar. What I once boasted to people as being the most Westernized nation in the Middle East, I now see as devastatingly archaic and oppressed."

"Perhaps better known as 'The hijab porn star', Khalifa hit the headlines in 2014 when she infamously humped on camera wearing the traditional Muslim garb. The BangBros film initially sparked outrage in her home country of Lebanon with haters claiming she had brought disgrace to the nation and insulted Islam. Khalifa stated in an interview with Loaded that she felt she is being made a scapegoat for internet censorship in her native land, and many others there have since demonstrated against the government, showing support for the American porn star. They claim that although she may have sex, 'She is still more decent than they are'."

"It gets me so down when I get 'no's' from companies who don't want to work with me because of my past, but I also thought I would never find a man like my fiancé. The fact that he appreciated everything I've done since porn meant so much."

"It all started to spiral out of control when the death threats from ISIS started coming in. That's when I stepped away. As soon as I started to gain popularity that's when I was like 'get the f*** out of this."

"It’s a text and movement conjuring of Latina archetypes and the women who embody them— past, present, and future. There are archetypes/stereotypes that are often placed upon Latinas (i.e. La Virgen, La Llorona, hot tempered, sexy, etc.) and I wanted to know what happens if the images we think we understand are, in fact, more complicated and more human than we thought? And then what happens if those “images” not only talk to us, but each other too?..."

"Don’t let anyone “should” all over you and don’t “should” all over yourself. Writers: nobody knows the story you want to tell better than you do. You get to decide what feedback serves you and the rest of it you can leave behind…"

"…For acting, I have no other place to begin besides my body, history, memories, and cultural points of reference. In my process, I’m my foundation and then the research, and additional character development gets layered on top. For writing, I admit I’ve got an agenda and I start from what I know—me…"

"…more than half the struggle is putting the pencil to the paper and trusting. If trust is too hard right now, know that page is the one place where you can always go back and use your eraser."

"I wish that more young people, especially less affluent people of color, would realize that we’ve been making stories forever, we’ve been creating rich characters. If we can ignore the pressure to tell a story the way “they” want to hear it and just tell it the way it is, we’ll continue to grow in the industry and have greater power."

"I know what they’re thinking. ‘You’re clearly queer, you’re dressed like a child, you have tattoos.’ They have this impression that a person that looks like me…I try not to be like ‘You’re fucking racist!’ or whatever, but they’re probably thinking, There’s no way you belong on the screen. And I’m so happy to shatter that forever."

"I think this is part of the female gaze…We are used to being watched, so why not watch ourselves, and why not enjoy it? Watching each other, excluding the visage of men—I can enjoy my sexuality."

"I can only speak for myself, but as an actor i wasn’t like, “I’m going to challenge the way people see Latin people.” I was just happy to get roles. I tried to find new material in characters, but I wasn’t post-race about it or anything like that. I was just looking at it as just work. I wasn’t framing myself, so I wasn’t framing characters. Now I see the importance of playing [certain types of] characters. I’m not necessarily choosing characters that go against stereotypes, I’m choosing characters that you don’t even have time to question where they would fit in. Or what box they would fit into."

"I have to say though it’s made it easier for white people to seek me out because I am half-white to ask me what they would be afraid to ask a mono-racial Asian American. I generally have intriguing, sometimes difficult, conversations with people about race…"

"I’m the most peaceful when I go to Hawaii because I fit in there as a biracial or “hapa” person. No one there questions my Asian-ness, and in fact, I feel my ethnicity is embraced and accepted…"

"In any professional setting, I’m a fish out of water on many levels, not just racially and culturally but also in the work I do, which involves many artistic disciplines…"

"While I’m proud to take risks artistically in my work, at the same time, I’ve had older generations of Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans who have chastised me for peddling (a phrase I hate) “pain-porn” because I have told my mom’s war-torn story. What a hurtful thing to say to someone who is speaking from the heart and basically laying out the facts of a person’s life. I’ve also had white Americans shaking their fingers at me saying “You’re a bad daughter!”…"

"I've always had this image of this strong, sprightly person who is undaunted by anything; on the contrary, I was one of the shyest, most unsure people you ever met in your life. But I have one very specific quality: I'm plucky. I really am. I would say that's a perfect description of my personality. I am able to get up and dust myself off and keep moving forward. I'm very stubborn. I never knew that about myself. But I realize how stubborn I am when I look at all the terrible things that happened to me and how I just get up and keep going."

"It got me roles. And you know, for a while, that was wonderful — I was in the movies. But after a while I began to understand that it was really very demeaning. And I began to feel more and more and more diminished. I was already very unsure of myself anyway, because when I was a very young girl in New York City I ran into an awful lot of racial bias, and I got called some pretty nasty names, like 'spic' and — all the words you heard in West Side Story came directly from the streets — 'garlic mouth,' 'pierced ear.' So by the time I was doing those kind of roles — for a living, practically, in Hollywood — I was beginning to feel pretty bad about myself."

"If you have been traumatised from the time you were a child to believe you were a ‘spic’, that you were a garlic-mouth, that you are not worthy, it takes a long time to get rid of that. That’s why therapy so often takes so long, because you’re trying to get rid of that trash before you can deal with the you that wants to get better. I went into therapy wanting to get better, knowing that in some way I had a sickness. And the sickness was Rita hates Rita."

"I think that some people are genetically just strong. I really believe that my mom was like that. On the other hand, maybe you're forced to be that way because you realize you're either going to sink or swim, and the choice you make determines the kind of person you become…"

"I was told I was crying all the time I was unconscious…It wasn’t done for drama, that’s for sure. What I really wanted to do was kill the bad Rita who was always getting me in trouble, but it turned out if you’re going to kill the bad Rita, you’re also going to kill the good one."

"What I say to my gente [people] is to hang on, and to remember who they are, be proud of who they are, and keep talking. And keep complaining, and just don't ever — don't give up. That's always been my motto anyway. My motto has always been "persevere" — perseverancia. And that's what we need to do."

"I think part of the reason is because, unlike the black community, we don’t mainly come from America. We come from all kinds of countries and we’ve siloed ourselves rather than supporting each other, as we should have. We still think of ourselves as Argentinian or Puerto Rican or Mexican rather than Hispanic. Until we get over that and become one big wonderful community, we’re still going to have problems."

"You are perceiving that Rita Moreno I presented to the world. What was I gonna do, say: ‘Really, I’m a weak person’? No, that was the persona. I am now that person, but it took me a very, very long time to become her."

"It was my choice, because I was being offered such crappy stuff. I was only offered gang movies on a way lesser scale and it was like the same fucking battle again. I couldn’t believe it. And it broke my heart. It. Absolutely. Broke. My. Heart. I thought: ‘I’ll wait for something better,’ and something better kept not coming. It was horrific."

"He didn’t like the raucous side of me and I love that side of me. I think I’m funny as hell and I think I’m cute and I think I’m mischievous. I know I’m mischievous. And that’s the kind of thing he discouraged, and that makes me very sad, because he was missing out on something pretty wonderful about me…You know, I think I owe an enormous debt to psychotherapy. Without that, I wouldn’t be the Rita you know and love."

"I have a great sense of humor about aging, and I think I’m one of the funniest people I know when it comes to aging, because I misplace stuff and I drive everyone crazy looking for the house keys or something. Once, I couldn’t find my purse, and I upended the car, upended the house. I could not find that fucking purse. And then two days ago, I opened the cabinet in the kitchen where all the doggie stuff is, and guess what? I had put it in there. I started laughing so hard, I nearly peed. I couldn’t stop laughing. I thought, You silly bitch."