While I have felt lonely many times in my life the oddest feeling of all was after my mother Lucille died. My father had already died but I always had some attachment to our big family while she was alive. It seems strange to say now that I felt so lonely yet I did.

I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity my father who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility and my mother's father who was always in trouble with gambling debts.

Selfishness narcissism being uncomfortable in your own skin not feeling connected to the world around you feeling dislocated from family and youth having a strange relationship with your childhood - all those things feel really true to me.

Our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit... Santa who was jolly - but let's face it he was also very judgmental.

I can't say it's not painful being estranged from most of my family. I wish it could be otherwise.

Young actors often don't think of the consequences of doing nudity or sex scenes. They want the role so badly that they agree to be exploited and then end up embarrassing family friends and even strangers.

That's a central part of philosophy of ethics. What do I owe to strangers? What do I owe to my family? What is it to live a good life? Those are questions which we face as individuals.

Being a Barrymore didn't help me other than giving me a great sense of pride and a strange spiritual sense that I felt OK about having the passion to act. It made sense because my whole family had done it and it helped rationalise it for me.

Never lose sight of the fact that the most important yardstick of your success will be how you treat other people - your family friends and coworkers and even strangers you meet along the way.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.