No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
Not a single man on earth knows from his own experience the how and where of his birth, only from tradition, which is often very uncertain.
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 father's family can be traced back to 1400. I've been told by gypsies that there is unmistakeably gypsy blood in me. Lee is a gypsy name, you know.
When I was a boy, I would ask about my family history, about my bloodlines. We really didn't know that much. We had a little Indian in us from the Oklahoma Trail of Tears.
Dad's Jewish and Irish, Mom's German and Scotch. I couldn't say I was anything. My last name isn't even Downey. My dad changed his name when he wanted to get into the Army and was underage. My real name is Robert Elias. I feel like I'm still looking for a home in some way.
My mother is Brazilian, and her grandfather was Italian.
Neither my father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, great grandfather or great grandmother, nor any other relation that I know of, or care a farthing for, has been in England these one hundred and fifty years; so that you see I have not one drop of blood in my veins but what is American.
I was a poor kid. I grew up watching film and television but primarily television. And I graduated high school, and I knew I wanted to go to college because nobody in my family had. So I was like, 'I'll go and be a theater major.'
When I was a kid, my mum had a lot of Dumas books in the house, and she's from France originally. My mother had one particular Dumas book that was a family heirloom - this old, beat-up 1938 edition of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' in French. She came to America after losing her parents in World War II as a little kid.
I must admit, even though I'm the product of two Jewish parents, I think the Irish temper got in there somewhere, so I'm going to check Mom's genealogy.
My mother's the youngest of 10 children too, so we have sort of a special bond in that we know what that feels like. It's a strange spot to be in.
As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.
My father's father wrote for a Philadelphia newspaper and aspired to be a playwright. We had in our house a couple of crazy unproduced plays that he had written. For the one creative writing class I took in my life, I didn't do any writing - I decided that I would plagiarize his terrible play to not fail the class.
My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.
My father didn't know his real name. My father got his name from his grandfather and he got his name from his grandfather and he got it from the slave master.
My grandfather worked in a shoe factory - he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family.
My family is from Elmhurst, Queens, 54th Avenue, but I was born in Northern California.
My mother giving birth to me was just like Lady Sybil giving birth, except that there wasn't such a tragic ending.
I was raised on pork... steak, chicken, everything... And everyone in my family pretty much of the older generation has diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, cancer.
I was a vegetarian first. I had high blood pressure at 27, everybody in my family died of cancer, and I knew it was in the food, so I changed my diet.
I moved to L.A. when I was, like, 6 months old. I was born in Georgia 'cause my dad was going to college at the University of Georgia for music. Then we moved to the Valley, and my dad was a songwriter out here.
Both grandfathers fought in different wars. My mother's father fought in World War II, and then my father's father fought in Korea. And they're both these country boys, one from rural Tennessee and one from rural Louisiana - and they never went back home.
My father is from the village of Beranci, Macedonia, and my mother is from Greece.
My grandmother lived to be 100 years old. Her grandmother was a slave, yet she was a college graduate in the Spellman class of 1917. She taught art for 50 years and she saved her Social Security checks for her children's education.
