I think of myself as a little kid, and I had a wild imagination, but it was something that was encouraged and supported, which helped steer me into the arts.
The Frankfurt Museum of Decorative Arts is a handsome building, which takes its cues from the riverside Biedermeier villa next to it, and it is well-integrated into an overall scheme for a group of small museums.
I just had this feeling that, if I were to get into a fight, somehow I would have the ability to fight back, just based on playing ‘Street Fighter’ for so many years of my life. It’s almost like I actually learned martial arts.
Remember, the early ’60s in London was something – which must have been like Berlin in the ’30s when the arts flourished. You didn’t have the differences in class, and so on.
I started doing martial arts when I was about 7, and I got my second degree black belt when I was 19. So I have my second degree black belt, but I’ve never used it, and I had to stop when I got ‘Instant Star’ because I couldn’t train.
I will end up with someone in the arts. I am positive. I eat, breathe and sleep acting. And I’ll end up with someone who is happy staying at home and having me cook supper. But I also really need to be intellectually challenged and stimulated. I want someone bookish, and someone who is passionate.
I am a hobbyist photographer so I relate to the visual arts that way, but I’m not a painter.
The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student’s education.
I do practice martial arts, more as a recreational thing, but a lot of my friends have been heavyweight champions the in mixed martial arts world.
Girls like Diana Spencer, armed with nothing more than a guinea-pig-rearing certificate, proud to say in that old Sloane way that she was ‘as thick as two short planks,’ became the exception as girls from Benenden and Downe House started to fast-track towards the City and law, consultancy, media and the arts.
Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?
I will continue to practice a martial arts form along with the mental and spiritual aspect that come with building a balanced life, and I will continue to incorporate it into whatever films I can.
A good choreographer is one that’s going to collaborate, teach, guide – everything. The wonderful thing on ‘Brotherhood of the Wolf’ was that we had Philip Kwok – he choreographed John Woo’s ‘Hard Boiled,’ and in the ’70s, he was a martial arts actor, stunt man, fighter, choreographer in Hong Kong.
Every Halloween for six years, I was a Ninja Turtle, and Mikey was my favorite. The turtles really made me who I am today. They got me into martial arts, meditation, surfing, skateboarding; big time influence on who I am today.
Law builds upon and, I should like to claim, is one of the liberal arts. It uses words of persuasion and changing definitions for practical ends.
The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.
My father was a big Bruce Lee fan. He’s Chinese-Hawaiian, and my mother is Chinese. He used to take us to all these really fantastical films with martial arts in them. And Bruce Lee was amazing.
The African mind has a lot to contribute, not only to world understanding of the arts, but to an understanding of spiritualism. That is the contribution Africa will make to the world of the future – an injection of sanity into the environment of the universe itself.
Acting is a tough industry. There are a lot of kids out there at drama schools and not a lot of money about, especially as the arts are being cut.
