I started dancing at age three and then got involved in musical theatre and acting around age seven. I think I’ve probably known since then that I want to be a professional actor.
After I grew some facial hair, I looked a bit older, and I guess that’s what the modeling world wanted because I started booking more luxury brands.
I really just try to enjoy the game and hope that I can inspire young kids. I started playing tennis because of Monica Seles, and I try to promote the sport in the best possible way. Sometimes it’s hard because you get upset on court, but I think in life one learns through experiences in order to evolve as a person.
I wore makeup when I was at school, and I wore makeup when glam started. I started wearing it again when punk started. I’ve always been drawn to wearing it. It’s partly ritualistic, partly theatrical and partly just because I think I look better with it on.
I started acting because I enjoyed school plays.
Drawing is the only thing I’ve found in which I can lose myself completely. I love it. It started as something that relaxed me, but now it’s a struggle because I’m pushing myself. The day-to-day sketching is fraught.
Fortunately, I never had to do the waiter thing. When I got out of college, I immediately started to teach acting. One of the first jobs I had was in a federally-funded program where I taught drama to young people.
It was when my American coach Dan Pfaff came over from the States in 2009 and started working with me that we really began to look at my diet. He decided I was eating too many carbohydrates, so I cut back on bread. Over the next year I lost weight and became leaner.
I started to draw desert islands. They were just rough, shapes in the middle of the page. Then I began drawing shapes within those shapes and I was amazed how quickly the islands got better. It took off from there.
Over the years, I’ve given myself a thousand reasons to keep running, but it always comes back to where it started. It comes down to self-satisfaction and a sense of achievement.
I started not enjoying myself. It wasn’t fun at times. And I always said when that point comes when it’s not fun anymore, then I’m done.
I had used the stretch materials for years to shape the inside of garments I made for private clients. Then I just started using them on their own.
I think that songwriting changed when groups started spending more time in the studio.
My grandmother worked at one of those Bel-Air mansions, and we would go – not too often, but every now and then – to pick her up. Hollywood was probably 12 miles from my house, but it might as well have been a million miles away. The only time I saw that world was on TV. Until I started making records.
Success happened little by little for me. I tasted the flavor of fame in small doses: I started at 10 years old when I won a music contest; I was performing at birthday parties, company meetings.
I wonder what the most intelligent thing ever said was that started with the word ‘dude.’ ‘Dude, these are isotopes.’ ‘Dude, we removed your kidney. You’re gonna be fine.’ ‘Dude, I am so stoked to win this Nobel Prize. I just wanna thank Kevin, and Turtle, and all my homies.’
When I started performing, there was no Internet; I didn’t really have anything to copy. I kind of had to just make up what I thought burlesque was, based on photographs of Sally Rand or whatever.
My parents split up when I was nine years old, and I started taking karate lessons at that point. I was very dedicated to my karate, and I looked up to my karate instructor kind of like a second father.
When I found Freestyle Fellowship, I started getting into the construction of rap. You get better at it the more you do it; you figure out the science and the math behind it.
Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.
You can make something big when young that will carry you through life. Look at all the big startups like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They were all started by very young people who stumbled on something of unseen value. You’ll know it when you hit a home run.
I started writing to reassure myself that I was still all here.
Airbnb started with ‘air bed and breakfast.’
My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn’t until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.
If I hadn’t started painting, I would have raised chickens.
I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.
Notorious B.I.G. was one of my favorites. I started getting into hip-hop around the Bad Boy era.
I first started rapping when I heard the Sugarhill Gang in 1979, when I was 11 years old in seventh grade.
When I started out, nobody told you how to do an interview. That’s how I ended up on the front page of a newspaper dressed as Rodney Trotter with a Reliant Robin.
I found myself getting more publicly shy when the gala events and big crowds started. Some people embrace it. To me, it’s not worth enough to risk my private life being public.
My husband was a pilot. He flew Elvis when Elvis first started making appearances around the country.
When I started on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I had the choice of wearing contact lenses, which I had never worn before, or glasses, in order to be able to read the cue cards.
I want to leave something behind. A blueprint. A work ethic. Something that my great-grandkids and their kids and their kids can see: This is where it started. Lineage. Intergenerational wealth. Things that are here forever. All that.
The minute I stepped foot on the shop floor and started serving in a retail environment, I knew it was the career for me. I was a shop assistant for just one day, and I thought, ‘This is it. This is the rest of my life. This is all I want to do.’
When I was at ‘Newsweek’ magazine – which, you know, this really sounds like I walked four miles in the snow to school – but I started at ‘Newsweek’ magazine in 1963, which was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So it was actually legal to discriminate against women, and ‘Newsweek’ did.
I started out doing my mother’s nightclub act, and I had stage fright.
I didn’t go to school for illustration. I did larger pieces, mostly drawings and paintings, and minored in video, but when I moved to N.Y.C., I didn’t have a studio space anymore and downsized to my desk and started illustrating. I started a greeting card company and sold cards all over the city.
I started with the firm conviction that when I came to the end, I wanted to be regretting the things that I had done, not the things I hadn’t.
I started out as a high school teacher in inner-city Chicago and realized quite quickly that my students weren’t that motivated.
Even as far back as when I started acting at 14, I know I’ve never considered failure.
I started at the Incognito Theatre as an amateur.
Let’s go, champ’ started as a way to motivate myself.
When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was ‘It will be O.K.’ I would wonder, ‘How the hell is it going to be O.K.?’ The worst word in the English language is ‘hope.’
I started in the restaurant business at the age of 19 as a waitress. I loved the atmosphere and the camaraderie of the restaurant business. I loved not having to go to an office. I loved making people happy.
I started swimming. I frolic like Free Willy.
I work for everything I’ve got. I started off as a very poor kid. I want to get paid.
It’s just been such an amazing experience from the day I started on ‘Smackdown.’
‘Pressure’ is a word that is misused in our vocabulary. When you start thinking of pressure, it’s because you’ve started to think of failure.
I haven’t had the opportunity to study visual art, but it was always my first love when it came to artistic expression. I started drawing and experimenting with visual art when I was 5.
I really hate the Detroit Pistons’ mascot Hooper. A lot of beef with him for a long time. I don’t why, he just started going after me.
I started studying business and finance in Edinburgh as a backup plan. I was still making music many hours a day, and when I was at university, the electronic music boom started really taking off globally.
I’ve always loved watching movies and pageants. As I grew up, my dreams turned into goals and I started working towards that direction. I took one step at a time and luckily, things worked out in my favour.
The original Byrds were very much Beatles-influenced, and then we gradually got our own sound. We started mixing things together more.
I worked hard to get where I am. And I started with nothing.
My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own heart; she thought that it had ruined her life, and I think she was right.
I started out in the Apollo Theater. That’s where I got my start. I won Amateur Night four weeks in a row.
I was inspecting eyeglass lenses for a while. And I worked as a concession girl in a movie theater. And I was ironing before that. I always had some kind of a job. And then I started modeling.
