I had saved a lot of money working at Mrs. Fields' Chocolate Chip Cookies, ushering at the Golden Gate Theatre, and doing odd jobs so I could live in New York for a few months. If it ran out, I would have to give up and go home. It turned out OK. I got my Equity card and started working.
When you're a big money earner and your husband isn't, it makes you question how feminine you are. I felt I was less feminine than if I was a supporting wife, or a second fiddle, or 'Mrs. Higgins.'
Working with Mrs. Clarke at The Gryphon School is when I really began to think of acting as a potential career.
I worked with Mrs. Davis for four years, and then she realized, as the material started getting harder, that I had never learned to read. I was just listening as she'd play the song, and I'd play it back. When that happened, she got very upset and stopped being my teacher.
I sent my flowers across the hall to Mrs Nixon but her husband remembered what a Democrat I am and sent them back.
I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, 'By the time you get this, Daddy, I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!'
When I think of the name 'Joyce' I think of a grandma or an old chubby Mrs. Claus.
For many people, Mrs. Brown has come from the middle of nowhere. But Mrs. Brown was first written for radio. I wrote it for a radio series in 1992. It was a five-minute piece for radio, and it's been absolutely astonishing.
I don't know the secret of Mrs. Brown, but what I do know is that there are things that Mrs. Brown says and does that Brendan O'Carroll couldn't get away with. I think maybe it's a leniency that they're with an old woman. It's the old woman thing. I think secretly we all just want to be Joan Rivers.
People have really taken Mrs. Brown to their hearts. I think she reminds them of their own mammies... Fierce and scary but full of love.
