You don't have to look like a warrior in every role.
At first I was always cast as the girlfriend. It was a long time before I got to play characters who were people.
I can't be an ingenue forever, and I wouldn't want to be.
Forget the brother and resume the man.
The label 'wife of the prime minister' is like a giant signboard pointing at my head from a Monty Python sketch. But I am not Mrs. Prime Minister. I'm a human being.
Traditionally, our society has always seen women as homemakers and men as bread-earners. The demarcations are engraved in stone, perhaps.
I realize that no one is going to come to me and ask me to be Julius Caesar or a romantic lead, but I think I'm a certain type of guy who looks a certain way, and that's just the reality of things.
Nobody ever thought of me as dumb. They always knew me as cerebral, a thinking person. Educated and so on. But I was always given glamorous roles.
A woman simply is, but a man must become.
I remember auditioning for the Wonder Woman television show and being told that I wasn't the Wonder Woman type, but if I wanted to play the best friend, I could audition for that.
I didn't debut in a film playing a diva.
Just because we are women doesn't mean the only roles we can play are that of the finger-shaking girlfriend.
First lady has been a thankless position. Eleanor Roosevelt was brilliant and had strong views. She was criticized for her politics and for her appearance. Mrs. Roosevelt was attacked for being too involved in politics. Bess Truman was criticized for being uninvolved in politics.
My husband always felt that a marriage and career don't mix. That's why he's never worked.
It is very hard to be a female leader. While it is assumed that any man, no matter how tough, has a soft side... and female leader is assumed to be one-dimensional.
Why was it important for women to be only nice? Why can't she have dark layers? So when they came to me - films like 'Maqbool' and 'Astitva' - they just grabbed me, and I wanted to be part of them.
Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.
Being a housewife and a mother is the biggest job in the world, but if it doesn't interest you, don't do it - I would have made a terrible mother.
I didn't really look like a character actor, yet those were the roles I loved to play. If you were a character actor who didn't necessarily look like a character actor, you had to play bad guys.
I wanted to be an actor to act, and now, being an actor, you have to dress up, you have to be nice, you have to be smart, you have to be sexy, you have to be ready.
Being a mother and wife are big roles.
My American accent is really, really good. I started out in the theater, doing all different characters with all different accents. When I first came to America, I thought I would be playing American, all the time. It was just weird how it worked out that I played more international characters.
Before 'Lucky Louie,' nobody would ever cast me to play a mom or a wife; nobody ever saw me in that role, which is weird, since that's who I really am.
Especially in the Dixie Chicks, everyone wants you to play a role. Natalie was the feisty one. Martie was the nice one 'cause she smiles all the time onstage, and I was the quiet one.
I think I'm a character actress in a leading lady's body, but the industry doesn't really see me that way.
