My mother was making $135 a week but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables cook them with garlic onion and Spam and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?

I still have a photo on my wall of the greatest idol I will ever have in my life and it's myself at eight. Because that's when the forces of imagination have the same value as the real world when they're an instrument of survival: when my mother disappeared and I imagined a mother. That was me at my best.

My identity is linked to my grandmother who's pure Filipino as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify.

I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.

Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor and the proper fondness for his mother.

I was a product of a divorced family and I used humor as a weapon to combat sadness. I used comedy to make my mother laugh in light of the darkness that she faced and to me it became a very powerful tool at a very young age at six. I saw how therapeutic it could be.

People come up to me as I leave the stage after a performance and tell me tey saw my mother onstage with me every time I sing. I keep a sense of humor about it.

I'm Method trained. How is this character like me? What does she think of her mother? What does her mother think of her? It's like construction and then yes you hope you're talented and that the universe aligns and captures the kind of laborer's work you've done and whatever else sprinkles down on you and it's all caught on film or onstage.

When I was a kid my father didn't really have much hope for me. He thought I was a dreamer he didn't think I would amount to anything. My mother also.