Words matter. These are the best Ellen Barkin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have huge hands and feet. I’m 5’6″ and wear a size 10 shoe.
Men who love their mothers treat women wonderfully. And they have enormous respect for women.
It is clear I was never the Pretty Girl. I had my two front teeth knocked out when I was 10 and didn’t fix them until I was 19. I have a crooked smile and a nose that looks like it’s been broken 12 times but never has been. My nose was always red, so people called me Rudolph. My whole face is off-center.
I wish I had a little more ambition. But then what would I do? Turn down more roles with more vehemence? Me no likey worky.
I guess I worry about weird existential things, like how do we spend our final act. This is a very emotional question. I can’t answer it without crying. I think, You’re 56 years old, what did you do? You raised two good kids. What am I going to do now that is as meaningful as that? I don’t know the answer yet.
I guess if you’re lucky enough not to have to pay your rent, then you or I take much more seriously the kind of work that I do, what it takes for me to leave two teenagers of my own and six stepchildren and a husband and four grandchildren.
I studied acting for 10 years before I went for an audition. I studied with Lee Strasberg and Actors Studio teachers, and went to the High School of Performing Arts.
But one of the hardest things for me to do was to access anger. I could do it on stage. But when I did it on film it was hard for me. That probably has to do with the intimacy of film. And my own personal issues with expressing anger. So I had to learn how to do that.
No more bare bodies in film scenes for me. For my children’s sake, I must stop. The other kids at school keep throwing it up to my children, and they are not kind.
I’m just curious, who’s more fit to raise a child? A loving committed same-sex couple or an unmarried 15-year-old with no income and really no skills to parent?
I have skinny genes. My mother weighs 90 pounds.
When a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old, so desperately wants a baby what she’s looking for is the kind of unconditional love a child gives a mother and a mother gives a child.
People tend to remember my performances, not me.
You’ve got a movie where the pro-choice family gives their daughter no choice. The pro-life family murders. What seems to be the good mother, the kind of hippie painter, sweet and cute mother has no love for her daughter really.
Gabriel Byrne is an extraordinary human being. We have two extraordinary kids and we work at it. We were always friends. He stuck by me through very hard times, and I hope he’d say the same about me.
I like being married. I like taking care of people, having someone to make dinner for.
I eat cheese and salami and a lot of fried chicken. I eat a big bag of oatmeal-raisin cookies every night and I don’t gain weight. I still look OK as long as I’m dressed.
It’s no stretch to picture me standing next to Al Pacino or Robert De Niro. Those are ethnic New York men. I’m an ethnic New York girl. Everybody has their limitations. I mean, I should never be cast as Queen Elizabeth.
I’m tenacious, I think – I know – and I do also have a quality where if you tell me I can’t do something, if I know I can’t do it I’m the first to raise my hand and say, ‘I can’t do that.’ But there is a big Bronx, New York Jew in me that just says, ‘Really? Really? You think I – yes, I can. I can do it. I can do it.’
When they make a woman’s picture, they treat it like a ‘woman’s picture.’ In the ’40s, they didn’t treat Joan Crawford movies like that, but as the big movies of their year. I’m upset that there’s no ‘Terminator’ with a woman in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s role. Because that would make just as much money.
There’s no slow build anymore where you get a little part, then you get a little better part, then a better part, until one day your agent calls you us and says, ‘guess what, you’re a movie star,’ and you say, ‘Thank you!’
My nickname was Skinabo – ‘skin and bones.’
Would you just strap some toe shoes on and dance ‘Swan Lake?’ No. Would you just put a violin in your hand and – ? No. I felt that way about acting, and I was taught to feel that way. I didn’t come to it on my own.
Skinniness is not your friend when you’re over 40. I’d like to gain a good 10 pounds, but I did always have a fat, round face that plagued me when I was young. When I started to make movies, I couldn’t look at myself.
There is a certain androgyny to my appeal.
