Women Born In The 1950s

"Aging is human evolution in its pure form. Death, taxes and aging .... We are ALL going to age and soften and mellow and transition."

"We are all born worthy. Worthy of love, worthy of success."

"And it felt really good to be needed. And to be trusted. And to be special."

"I think happiness comes from self-acceptance. We all try different things, and we find some comfortable sense of who we are. We look at our parents and learn and grow and move on. We change."

"Getting older makes you more alive."

"Exchange the words ‘have to’ with ‘get to.’ Exchange the word ‘can’t’ with ‘unwilling.’"

"I don't think any woman wants to be known for being beautiful or busty. I think you want to be known for who you are."

"The greatest gift to give to the people you love the most is your recovery."

"People get real comfortable with their features. Nobody gets comfortable with their hair. Hair trauma. It's the universal thing."

"People lose their senses at the beach 'cause the sun beats down too hard. They say things that just don't gel, you know. Well, you've heard this a lot: "Pick up a shell - oh, you can hear the ocean!" You could pick up a bicycle and hear the ocean - you're at the beach. Put the shell down, you'll hear the ocean twice as loud."

"Don't ask me about Beverly Hills High School. Everybody hated it. I hated it. Hated it. Hated it. Hated it."

"[W]hen I was a kid and I would get upset when people laughed at me when I didn't mean to be funny. I would always hear: 'We're not laughing at you. We're laughing with you.' But I would say, 'I'm not laughing.'"

"As an actor you can't approach the character with that kind of awareness or it plays as 'I hate myself.' Dottie thought she had a right to her life and that was tricky to play."

"[W]hat I do is not mimicry or an impersonation, but more of an assimilation"

"I was brought up not to be selfish or self-centered. So if you play somebody who isn't so lovable, you can play that person and no one will turn on you."

"I feel that you reach a certain age and then things start to jell. My sense of self is stronger. I'm getting bolder in my old age. After I hit forty, you couldn't mess around with me so much anymore."

"At least I won't have to buy ."

"Anita Harding's clinical wisdom, enthusiasm, talent for research, and extraordinary personality epitomise all that we value most in a clinical scientist. Anita was an ambassador for British neurology, who patrolled the far corners of a still significant empire which had its roots at Queen Square where she worked and was happy. The evidence for her scientific achievement is in the writings; the style is in our memories. Each will endure. The rise in Anita's career - a readership and honorary consultancy in neurology at the National in 1987, a personal professorship in the University of London in 1990, and chairmanship of neurology at the Institute in 1995 - was meteoric. She served on the editorial boards of eleven journals and eighteen research panels, was a frequent member of the teaching faculty at international meetings, and held visiting professorships in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America and Australia. From amongst the Aladdin's cave of Anita's scientific achievements can be singled out her classifications of the peripheral neuropathies and hereditary ataxias, and genotype-phenotype correlations for each, the first identification of a mitochondrial DNA mutation in human disease, the spectrum of trinucleotide repeats in neurodegeneration, and the population genetics of disorders which show ethnic or geographic restriction. For her manifest achievements, and for our comfort in her absence, I commend Anita Harding to you as the Association's (joint) first medallist for distinguished contributions to neurology."

"The Hereditary Ataxias will guarantee Anita Harding a place in the history of 20th century neurology."

"Growing old: the most common mitochondrial disease of all?"

"w:Marla Lukofsky: "I am indeed shrinking, but that's okay because I can buy my clothes off the rack in the children's department. It's great. There I am at a wedding wearing this gorgeous gown. A five year old was wearing the same one. Bitch!""

"w:Marla Lukofsky: "My parents were so worried that I might not get married, so I finally got married. There's just one problem; she's black. But she's a doctor, so that's okay.""

"I was really intimidated, but then the acting kicks in. We have a similar fire, so he doesn't intimidate me in that way; I can get really angry, I can get in your face too."

"We began talking about the characters and he opened up about his vision. He's extremely thoughtful and sees grand issues both social and political in an interesting way. Quite honestly, I wasn't certain how some of his ideas were applicable to the screenplay, but he was heartfelt and adamant about them. And I remember completely going with it."

"While I didn't know it at the time, Daniel had suggested to Michael that I play Cora before we had ever met. And prior to our meeting, I was at a restaurant with John Bailey, the director, when I felt this man looking over in our direction and smiling a good deal. I realized, after leaving, that it was Daniel. He later told me that he was having lunch with Michael and had coincidentally asked him earlier that very day about me. It's just a funny thing, isn't it? And I was terribly flattered when he told me this tale. He was also very clear that the decision to cast me as Cora was all Michael's."

"In the 90's action pictures were all the rage. As a woman, I was fed up with them and I initially thought that the script was just another action film dressed up as a period piece. When Michael began speaking about the character's inner life, it was clear that his own inner life was strong, as well. I then saw Cora in a completely different light because of Michael's orientation. It became easy to personalize her."

"I feel like everything I tried to do is in there."

"When I said, "I feel like everything I tried to do is there", it is less because of what I did than it is a case of Michael keeping his word. Sometimes he'd launch into a discourse, a convoluted discourse about something or other, and I had no idea what he was saying. I'd tease him about it, "What on earth are you talking about?""

"The moment with Hawkeye is all about mutual attraction, expressed without filter from him, and a surrendering of social guardedness from Cora. She accepts his directness as her own."

"I love the life of an actor because you spend brief amounts of time with other people and then you just leave. I need to be alone a lot, and I need the outdoors."

"I am really astonished at the number of violent acts. I'm not saying that the movies created these situations, because there are a whole bunch of things. But a lot of people in the movie industry tend to run and hide from it like ostriches. Movie industry people are definitely in denial right now, but you do become de-sensitized to violence when you see it on the screen so often. Let's face it, violence exists for one reason in movies, and that's to get an effect, create an emotion, sell tickets."

"After you have a kid you're just so happy to be alive!"

"They have a tendency to get beaten up or thrown off a cliff, I know. Why does that happen with me?"

"Oh, it was just a movie that should have never been made. I'm horrible in it. I look at myself in it and think, "Oh, you stiff. Go die!" I can't even look at it. The only thing I can say about it was that it brought me to Texas."

"I'd just love to see a great love story, and nobody makes them anymore. You have great actresses like Cate Blanchett — she's fabulous in Pushing Tin and Elizabeth — and you don't use them."

"Sometimes I'll turn the channel and there's the movie and I can honestly say that those last few minutes always fascinate me. It's one of the rare instances when image, music, and drama work effectively."

"There came a point in time, with all the difficulty, all the frustration, where I was quite content to be where I was. I suppose one could call it a kind of enchantment, I don't know. The shoot was so difficult on the crew and the extras. Often, it was unpleasant for them and many left. But difficulty also creates its own kind of beauty, I suppose. And while I don't revisit it unless asked, there is this sense of apartness I felt during that period of time from our own world. Perhaps the others felt the same, I'm unsure, and that is what you might feel when you watch the movie. We were all so different, temperamentally from one another, it's impossible to believe that we were together for so long. The cast and crew. How could we be more different from one another? It's difficult to imagine. But something lovely came of it."

"There were mornings in the make-up trailer where I'd have fits of laughter because of the extraordinary daily events of the shoot. Sometimes, it was all too much to believe. But the wildest things happened. And Daniel was a wonderful and trustworthy partner. And a fine prankster as well."

"Because of the tension and difficulty, I remember trying to do the silliest things when we weren't rolling cameras, anything to lift the spirits. But once on set, it was important to have full concentration. And I genuinely liked all of the cast members very much."

"The location was very difficult to get to. I recall rock-climbing a good deal of the way in that long skirt, and I felt terrible for the crew members who had to haul the heavy equipment. For some reason, they couldn't get there by helicopter."

"There came a point in time when Michael was under a great deal of pressure to alter the film in a way that was just disturbing to him. I had not seen the movie, yet. He phoned me in July of '92 to look at his version. It was exactly what was released two months later with the exception of a couple of reaction shots which we went back in to get. I liked the movie very much and asked him what the studio's problem was. I felt that he was at a point where they might have worn him down (if that's at all possible)."

"The Kiss scene was attempted three times. The first was in a peculiar spot of the fort on the ground level. It felt forced to me, and I knew right away that, in spite of what others were saying, it was dead wrong. The next day at work, I went straight to Daniel and told him so, saying something to the effect that "It was my fault". We told Michael my opinion (and this was unusual), he thought it over, watched dailies (which we were not allowed to see) and came back and said "You're right"."

"You are so funny to ask me about "The Look". I've been asked many times, and I really am not sure what anyone means."

"First and foremost, I'm a feminist. And basically that stems from a strong belief that all people and creatures deserve equal opportunity, rights and respect."

"Today, the Princess Royal has been canonized as a secular saint, for her truly admirable international work on behalf of the Save the Children Fund. Her dedication and concern are beyond doubt, but she didn't catch them like measles."

"Bernard Levin, "Uneasy Lies the Head", The Times (23 January 1989)."

"When I appear in public, people expect me to neigh, grind my teeth, paw the ground, and swish my tail, none of which is easy !"

"I don't even know how this word came into being: "aerobics". I guess gym instructors got together and said, "If we're going to charge ten dollars an hour, we can't call it 'jumping up and down'.""

"Envy the kangaroo. That pouch setup is extraordinary; the baby crawls out of the womb when it is about two inches long, gets into the pouch, and proceeds to mature. I'd have a baby if it would develop in my handbag."

"[One of my friends] was in labor for 36 hours. (I don't even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours.)"