Ellen Pompeo Quotes

I've been told if you're an actress you can't sing, if you're a dancer you can't act, you can't do theatre and be respected if you've done a TV soap, you can't have a No. 1 record. All these different things they've told me I can't do, but I wanted to do them, so I've done them.

Growing up in England, people told you why you couldn't do things. Suddenly, I had a publisher banging on my door, and was given the creative green light to simply make.

When I decided to become an actress, I think I let some people down. It was a kind of rebellion.

I didn't know any successful actors in Kenya, so I felt like I could get away with going to college to study film more easily than I could with saying, 'I want to be an actor.' That's what I did.

I love a challenge. And I love defying limitation, gender stereotypes, and people's expectations of me as an actress.

You grow up in a Sicilian household, becoming an actor is not a big leap.

I've wanted to be an actor for such a long time that I haven't had anything else in my thoughts. I think my family would have quite liked me to be a lawyer.

I'd taken the bull by the horns by liberating myself and creating a career. It took guts - it was scary and chancy - but they discounted me as empty-headed: some little piece of fluff without any brain that happened to come along.

When I signed 'Kaaka Muttai,' a lot of directors told me that I shouldn't be doing the role of a mother so early in my career. But I went ahead, as I aspire to do challenging roles.

I'm used to taking risks - my career was a risk. Being a stand-up comic is not something that's normally accepted when your mother is Filipino.

Given my family background, whenever, as a child, I was asked about becoming an actor, I used to answer in the negative.

I don't have any regrets. When I quit college and moved to Los Angeles to become an actress, it was so that I would not look back and have any regrets.

When studios start telling me why a particular film project won't work, I remember 'Rocky.' I remember that the biggest success Bob Chartoff and I have had was a film nobody wanted to make.

My mother was asked to be a model when she was younger, but my father had not let her, so she was quite keen on me becoming a model. I just went off without telling my dad. I took off to Paris and never came back, but when I became a success and started making money, he was very proud of me.

I don't relate to people that look like me. I find it deeply unsatisfying to play a version of myself. It was something I had to figure out really early on, when I was at RADA, because I was being cast, over and over again, as the young, virginal thing. When I left RADA, I was on an absolute mission to never wear make-up.

When I started acting I knew nothing. It was a momentous decision to pick up the flyer for the 'Trainspotting' audition. 'Destined' is a bit of a poncy word for it, but I do think I was headed in that direction.

The things I love about this business the most, is that it is a challenge trying to prove to everyone - including yourself - that you can do something different than what people think you're capable of.

When I left high school - I was younger than my classmates, just 17 - I knew I wanted to be an actress, but I thought, 'When I go to college, I'd rather study something else.'

I knew I wanted to try comedy and acting. Even if I failed, at least I would have tried. It's better than never having tried.

I was painfully shy as a child; I was dyslexic. I had a single mother who's an immigrant. I just didn't believe acting was something that people like me could do on a professional level.

It's liberating to wear clothes that are outside the boundaries of what I'm supposed to wear, ya know, based on the traditional model, whether that be a country music singer, or being from the country. It's not a rebellious thing.

If you are a woman and an actor, it does not mean that you have to contain or limit yourself to just being that.

I knew that the only way to get noticed would be by doing something that was not expected of me. I was sure I wouldn't get noticed if I continued to play the heroine in films like 'Chashme Baddoor.'

Girls, we have to go 10 times harder than guys. We are still expected to give you the bars, give you the look, give you the routine. This is me - I wanna be a rapper, this is it.

I was such a mama's boy that no one imagined that I could come into the film line. She wanted me to do a bank job.