Brian Cox Quotes

Part of the creative journey for me was not to come up the conventional route. I didn't go through drama school. I chose not to. I came from a very working-class area, a child of Nigerian immigrants.

I am who I am: an Irish Catholic kid, working class from Long Island. And I made it big.

I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.

I've sort of escaped my background, as people often do, through art and culture.

My parents were so proud when I got a scholarship to go to theatre school - it was unheard of that a coal-miner's son should go to drama school.

I was not pushed into the business by anything other than my own ambition and my own dream of wanting to act.

While I love film and want to continue to pursue it 100 percent, my home is TV.

I don't think any of us would be who we are if our parents weren't who they were. People that are in show business, and their parents are not in show business, their parents probably motivated them to get in show business.

It has given me a global vantage point, being the daughter of immigrants from China, who had nothing when they came here. And now I am leading a company. It speaks to something deep in me, the concept that you don't have to start with anything.

I came from a working-class family, but I was supported by a grant system and had my fees paid, so I came out of Oxford with a debt of something like £200.

I love the film route and I'm gong to try my hardest to stay on it.

My dad grew up in a working-class Jewish neighbourhood, and I got a scholarship from my dad's union to go to college. I went there to get an education, not as an extension of privilege.

For me, it was not destiny to make it to where I am now - I thought for a long- time I would become a go-kart mechanic, or a job like this, not an F1 driver.

Some kids are good at math, some kids can run, and acting was an interest of mine. Because I knew you could do it for a living I decided, that's what I'm going to do.

People forget I go to work. They forget that the Coleridge house was bought and paid for by the daughter of a travel agent and a barmaid from what the actor Richard Burton once described as the nightmarish 'featureless suburb' of Croydon.

I knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that's what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre.

Being working class, my parents thought, 'Ian's going to uni, the first in the family,' and I'd do dentistry or accountancy. I was going to do accountancy; then I got a C in Economics and thought, 'Why am I doing this?' The only thing I was interested in was books and literature.

I grew up in a working class family. People thought I might go work at a mill. My mom wanted me to learn how to lay carpet because she was concerned about my future. Nobody had high hopes for me. But I was a hustler.

My father quite honestly played no role in my decision to become an actor.

After 'Muriel's Wedding,' I first went to America, and I was sent all these scripts about fat girls overcoming hurdles. Something in me knew not to go down that road, even if it was a good script.

Dre's from Compton, I'm from Brooklyn, and we both wanted to make a better life for ourselves, right? And we both - somehow, we're both recording engineers, that's how we got our break.

My father is a taxi driver, and my mother ran a small business. I hadn't even met a barrister before I got my first shot at the legal profession. But back then, I was lucky enough to be given a break - I can't help but wonder if I would be so lucky today.

I think there's this assumption that everybody would rather be a director, and I don't know that that's the case for me, so we'll see.

Sometime in your teens you have to decide what you want to do. I knew it had to be cinema.

I think the country will get behind someone who comes from a working-class background, who truly epitomizes the American Dream.