My father and brother always forced me to work out, and I never liked doing it.

My father, a bakery-truck driver, was the epitome of the work ethic that probably kept me knocking out columns six days a week for a rough total of 12,600 over 50 years.

My father taught me to play the sitar when I was seven years old. He and his elder disciples oversaw my teaching from the beginning, looking after my scale work, the poor things.

My father, whose work I adore... was down working on little things of grass and dead birds. Well, that didn't interest me. As an 8-year-old kid, I wanted knights in armor and so forth.

My mother gave birth to me on the floor of our apartment in Mecca with only my toddler sister to help her because my father was at work and no male guardian was available to take her to a hospital.

Finally after 19 years of stage work Shyam Benegal noticed me and I got my first break as an actor in 'Ankur' after that I have been seen on and off on screen as a bad guy, as a father or as an uncle.

I have no regrets. I wanted to raise the kids and be a present father. When I developed a movie, I was gone for a year. That didn't really work for me. That isn't fair to make these life-forms and then disappear.

My father died when I was young, and my mother, Ruth, went to work in an office selling theater and movie parties. She put me through private school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale. She sent me to camp so that I would learn to compete. She was a lioness, and I was her cub.

My father constantly reminded me that he named me after Angela Yvonne Davis, a scholar and activist who was well known for her work in tandem with the Black Panther Party. That felt like a purposeful, beckoning call to engage in strategic resistance and to fight for the oppressed.

My father never got films to our dinner table. It was never the case with us as well that our father works in films, and we know so many actors. It was like him going to work like any other father. In fact, my school friends would ask me if I have met a certain actor, and I would tell them that I haven't, which they found strange.

I was 18 and had taken A-levels in Woking where I grew up. But I didn't want to go to university so left sixth-form college. My father was in the building industry and he found me a job stripping concrete panels off buildings. It was dangerous work on high scaffolds, sometimes 12 hours a day, Monday to Friday, and often weekends too.

Share This Page