I sang barber shop harmony and sort of got into performing. And it just came naturally. Then, when I was in college after the war, I did a play, 'Pygmalion,' by George Bernard Shaw. And from then on, I knew that's what I wanted to do.
In the beginning, when you're acting in amateur theater and off-Broadway, it was unheard of that anyone else would get your costume. And it was important to get a good costume. You put time into that.
My father was a GP; my mother was a teacher and amateur actress. My father was a bit of a storyteller, but the acting influence must have been from her - yes, put it down to my mother.
Our effects were primitive. Our stars were a black cloth with holes in it and light behind.
I used to do a lot of serious theatre during my school and college days. Comedy was only reserved for youth festival and inter-college competitions. Then once 'The Great Indian Laughter Challenge' was launched, a regional channel in Punjab started a program based on that. I participated in it and emerged as the winner.
I started acting when I was at Amherst my junior year, and my lacrosse career kind of started to flop sideways after that.
I don't think a professional agent or theatre manager would say my career had gone as well as perhaps it should have after that first 'Oliver!' success, but then again I was never really intending to have a career in the professional theatre in the first place.
I did little theater things growing up.
My dad was a keen actor when he was young; my auntie is heavily involved in amateur dramatics back in Northern Ireland, and my great aunt was a woman called Greer Garson.
By the time I was twelve, I had started my own theater company and was doing plays in the backyard and the front yard and all over the neighborhood, so, you know, I was definitely a lifer even back when I was 10.
The great classics that, as a professional you don't get to do, you do as a student, when you don't know any better.
I started acting as a child in Community Theatre but I didn't do any serious stuff. It was all musicals like 'Annie' and 'Wizard of Oz.' I was always in the chorus.
I'd done plays in middle school, done some for the church in high school, but I had no intention of ever being a professional actor.
I was clearly brought into the whole thing about acting by my mother. She loved the theater. She had a very pleasant singing voice, which she used to sing for her ladies' club.
I fell in love with acting at around the age of 11, when I was drafted in to play a fairy at an amateur production of 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'
I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.
I had - along with my singing and dancing, I was very happy to be born in the hometown of Dylan Thomas. So the government was financing dramatic groups and amateur dramatics and stuff like that.
Every small town has its dramatic group, its barber-shop quartet, every home has music in one form or another.
I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertaker's assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
I've been acting since I was six years old, but not professionally.
I was more interested in playing sports than acting. I didn't take acting too seriously until the end of my junior year.
My father used to act in high school. He was in a production of 'Othello;' I don't know who he played, but it wasn't Othello. He would talk about it, though, and read Shakespeare to me.
My dad and his brothers were involved in amateur dramatics. From an early age, I was dragged along to rehearsals when they couldn't get childcare. I was watching pensioners dance around in sweatpants, which was very traumatic for a young child.
I expected to be doing basement theater in the suburbs of Stockholm.
I started out in summer stock, and that's really what I prefer.
