This has been my life for many years; one role feeds the other. It is a joy to be an artist, but it doesn't mean very much unless that work is somehow useful in some way and contributes to others.

To do something good, it has to scare you.

I can tell my children that they don't need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.

Violence against women and lack of intervention and man's inhumanity to man and this kind of atrocities are going on. These are big issues of our times, we must speak about them, we must learn how to better understand how these things happen so we can address them.

I think as a human being, as a mother, as someone who works internationally, I needed desperately to know a man like Louis Zamperini in my life, to know that there is hope.

I became an actress because my mom wanted me to become an actress. It took me until my mid-30s to realize I actually didn’t. I actually wanted to write and direct and be more involved in politics and humanitarian issues.

Our family may seem extraordinary in some magazines or something, but at home it's not. We're really just a very loving family. We're very close, and we don't read magazines. We just kind of go to work and come home. We try to keep a sense of reality into their lives. What's truly real, not Hollywood real.