Timothy Spall Quotes

My mom came from such humble beginnings and especially my dad as well. He didn't go to university.

I grew up on a council estate in south London; my dad was a bus driver and my mum sewed clothes to bring in extra money. My parents worked hard and were able to save up and buy a home for our family.

I have a humble background. My dad was a coal miner. My mum worked a receptionist. I was one of the first people in my family to go to university.

My father was a tailor, my mother a machinist.

I come from an ordinary family - my dad is a carpenter, a roof-maker - and we've always loved racing together.

I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.

The only honourable work my parents knew was blue-collar. But while my father Robert ran a pawnbroker's shop, and my mother was a waitress, I moved into a middle-class world with a level of security they never knew.

My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur.

My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.

Both my mother and father worked for everything that they had.

My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.

I had a very easy middle class upbringing and never had to worry about anything. But my parents came from nothing and from broken homes, and their stories were always very interesting.

My parents were not professionals. They were products of the Depression.

My parents climbed their way to the middle class.

My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?

There is no employing class, no working class, no farming class. You may pigeonhole a man or woman as a farmer or a worker or a professional man or an employer or even a banker. But the son of the farmer will be a doctor or a worker or even a banker, and his daughter a teacher. The son of a worker will be an employer - or maybe president.

My mother was a seamstress, my father an itinerant carpenter.

I'm first-generation money in my family.

I come from a long line of below-stairs maids and gardeners. Good ol' peasant stock. My mother and her sister made a quantum leap out of that life. Then I made another quantum leap.

My parents were very religious. My mother came from Co Donegal to work in the shirt factory in Derry when she met my father.

My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.