On her extreme thinness during her 'Ally McBeal' years: "I started under-eating, over-exercising, pushing myself too hard and brutalizing my immune system. I guess I just didn't find time to eat. I am much more healthy these days.

I think that anything that you do, any accomplishment that you make, you have to work for. And I've worked very hard in the last ten years of my life, definitely, and I can tell you that hard work pays off. It's not just a cliche.

Being on the set of Aliens was an amazing experience. I had so much fun, and enjoyed every moment. I think my fondest time would be having the opportunity to work with Sigourney Weaver, one of the classiest people I have ever met.

I have a thing about underwear. I have to wear thongs. Since I was a showgirl in Las Vegas, and I was wearing G-strings all the time, I got this thing where I cannot stand to have on regular underwear. It drives me out of my mind.

If you think about Audrey Hepburn, I think she became more beautiful when she stopped being an actress and started working with humanitarian campaigns. The more engaged you can become the more you can shed your self-consciousness.

My husband wasn't put off by it - he thought it was hilarious to see me dressed as Dylan! He didn't particularly want to kiss me with stubble all over my face - it felt a bit odd! But I think he's used to it [the make-up process].

I get letters from kids, teenagers and young girls who just want to be Mac. I've had quite a few people actually say that they're going to become a Marine or a JAG lawyer because of me... the character. I think that's pretty cool!

I think essentially the meaning of life is probably the journey and not really any one thing or an outcome or a result. I think it's kinda the process and I think that if you can find happiness in the process then maybe that's it.

I grew up in South Africa and I would look at maps and we were at the bottom of the world. There was this whole thing up there. I was always reading encyclopedias about the world. So travel was something I was always attracted to.

It takes a lot of work to be a great mother, a great daughter, and a great friend. All those things take effort, and I think, after having my daughter, she opened up this fearlessness within me, and I'm setting an example for her.

I don't think you can measure wealth in dollars and cents. I really don't believe that at all because there are some things that money cannot buy. One of them is health. And the other is security in your relationships and friends.

When I got the script for 'Winter Soldier,' I was so excited to see that my character finally gets to punch somebody! So I took tae kwon do three times a week. I wanted to feel like I could hold my own in a roomful of superheroes.

If you're beautiful, you're led to believe that you can't also be smart. But you can be fun and fit and social and be really smart. And the smarter you are, the more capable you'll be to handle whatever challenges come up in life.

My message is: You don't have to give up being popular, fun, or fashionable in order to be smart; they can go hand and hand. Doing math is a great way to exercise your brain; being smart is going to make you more powerful in life.

I like being pregnant - feeling the baby moving, acknowledging the miracle that we're capable of producing a whole other being from scratch. I feel more like a woman than ever before. There's just an all-around sensation of power.

For me, I don't have a publicist. I don't want to talk about my personal life. I don't want to talk about my process. I don't want to be a model and do fashion shoots. It's nice to be an entertainer, but I'm a reluctant celebrity.

I have a bunch of friends at the University of California at Berkeley, so that's always a fun drive. Last summer I took five road trips to Berkeley. It's so beautiful. I like to take the scenic routes and make stops along the way.

I think of those who are so much less fortunate than me all the time. I came out to people clapping and an outpour of support. And the reality is, for a lot of people, they get kicked out of their homes or are faced with violence.

A lot of the younger Indian generation are either IT geniuses or doctors - the number of doctors I've seen in L.A. who are Indian is just crazy. So it is a very common thing. Or an accountant! That again is a very, very big thing.

once you laugh at you own weaknesses, you can move forward. Comedy breaks down walls. It opens up people. If you're good, you can fill up those openings with something positive. Mabye........ combat some the ugliness in the world.

Peter Sellers was great to work with. A lovely man. A little bit crazy in that he - you know, as I say, it was hard. It was sort of balancing a very delicate spirit on a needle. You know, because you never know where he was going.

I'm not goal-oriented so much as I'm constantly aware of what I'm passionate about, and I'm constantly updating the list. I envision many possible futures for myself where I could be happy, so I just try to keep my passions alive.

When you're on set, and that clock is going, every second you spend doing something is a second you spend not doing something else. That's true of all of life, but it's very vivid on a film set because you're always managing that.

I'm just a normal mother with the same struggles as any other mother who's trying to do everything at once and trying to be a wife and maintain a relationship. There's absolutely nothing perfect about my life, but I just try hard.

I believe that there is good. I believe there is evil. Do I believe that they come from God who is watching us conduct myriad never-ending wars and looks benignly on because there's higher purpose to all of this? I don't think so.

Some objects and events may be photographed, others, if one is to render their true quality, should be painted or set to music, since their essence is more faithfully reproduced through imagination than by the journalistic report.

I'm a big fan of people like Rachel Bilson and Kate Bosworth. I think they're so chic and have this cool edgy-rocker feel. For about a month I tried to do that, but what I realized is that I can't be anything other than what I am.

I was lucky to book a show pretty quickly after getting to L.A., but I struggled getting started in Vancouver. If I had gotten those earlier roles in Vancouver, I wouldn't have gone to L.A. to get the show that launched my career.

I fear getting things wrong and messing up, and this makes no rational sense. When I'm mindful and awake, I know mistakes are part of a creative process. But when I become disconnected, I can be incredibly mean and hard on myself.

I can't say I'm not guilty of age discrimination when it comes to animals. Like most people I've walked into a shelter more than a few times and a magnetic force has pulled me toward those fluffy little puppies in the corner cage.

People laugh at me. Sometimes I know why, and sometimes I don't. But I can pretty much find humor in anything. That is a necessary part of life. I don't want to say laughter is healing, because it sounds corny, but it's a release.

My heart gets very tender when it comes to playing someone who has wronged someone else. I almost feel like it's easier for me to play having been wronged than it is to actually feel like you had an active part in hurting someone.

When it comes to other celebrity brands, I think a lot of people do a great job, but it can't be all about them. Everybody doesn't want to just look like the celebrity, because they can't. They just want one element of that style.

It's so important to have a great relationship with your physician. It's one of those essential relationships that I find to be as important to nurture as any other relationship in your life. Without your health, you have nothing.

I conducted a bunch of interviews for Interview magazine. They actually paid me. I think I was probably 18 or 19. I was in college and I remember feeling, like, "Wow." I had a real job, and they paid me money, and it was exciting.

[Penn Jillette] said, 'If a truck is barreling toward you, no amount of positiveness will stop it from hitting you.' I needed to hear that I didn't have to be enthusiastic all the time. Some days you just need to be in a bad mood.

Although I missed home, North Carolina is a spectacular place to spend four months. Wilmington has a great downtown area. It is not too small town or too big city. The people were really welcoming and nice. The weather was lovely.

Of course I'm totally biased, but I think my mom is an amazing educator. She continues to work tirelessly for the kids in her classes, year after year - despite the innumerable obstacles she faces. She is a huge inspiration to me.

I have played Blair Cramer for 20 years, I feel a personal investment in the success of 'One Life to Live.' I love the show, I'm a fan of the characters, and I have invested in the journey these fictional characters have traveled.

That's what's so special about 'One Life to Live:' it's just this real family in the sense of, we're only as strong as our weakest link. It behooves us to help people who haven't done the genre because it makes us all look better.

My mom is 70, and she's still wearing the things she wore in the 80s. I appreciate people like that, who know who they are and what they like to wear - and have fun with it. Like, you can see that they enjoy expressing themselves.

When I was a little girl - if I could have - I would have gone a year without washing my hair. I hated it, to the point where my sisters had to pay me to wash my hair. I think, after experiencing that, I like to wash it every day.

I'm not saying that every night of the week, my husband, ex-husband, our children and I all sit around together like one big happy family. But we do see each other frequently, and everyone loves each other, and we are all friends.

Something that was instilled in me by my parents at a very young age is that there is no happy life without a life of service. Over the course of my career, I've been fortunate to always encounter others who share that philosophy.

I have a particular pair of boyfriend jeans that I wear with Converse sneakers and, really, any kind of top, from a crop top to a hoodie. I usually go for a loose top or jacket to keep things casual with sort of a streetwear vibe.

Reading something for the first time and getting this feeling like the material provokes you on some level, and doing the movie is really just sort of defining and figuring out why exactly you felt certain things when you read it.

Ever since I had my first child I have been passionate in my commitment to preserve our precious resources for my children and their children's children. This is the obligation of all of us visiting this planet for a limited time.

I think it's a deeper issue on the lack of communication in our culture in general. It's not abnormal to see a family out to dinner and every person is on their phone instead of communicating with each other and that's pretty sad.

I think it's interesting that there's always a dark cloud hanging over my character, in every movie. Even in Fat Man and Little Boy, where it's a real dark cloud. In Mask, it's more the judgment of others, but it's still a threat.

My grandmother, she passed away at Christmas time. So now, I have this built in sadness, you know, every holiday. 'Cause I'm plagued with the thought of, you know, what she would have given me. What didn't I get to open this year?

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