In New York - not to say New York isn't a competitive place - but there's much more of a sense of, we're all here and some of us are up and some of us are down and some of us are in the middle, but we have a longer view of history and how it works, rather than just this week.

I have a cousin, a second cousin, who lives in L.A., and she was with me while I was getting ready. She was talking about her father and his brothers. And I remember my mother's tales of how competitive they were with each other and how they would play for blood, you know. And I thought - I'm an only child, and I don't know what that's like. I have to figure out the Southern thing.

Every Thursday or something, my mother would shoot it at NBC Studios at Rockefeller Center. And sometimes she would have me there when Morris The Cat was on, and Lassie was on.

There are a lot of myths about gay people.

It is interesting to see how far we've come as a society since then. But also how everybody keeps touching [Ronald] Reagan and trying to evoke him.

I feel that the thing about film and particularly about TV, actually, is it's being created now. We're living in the best time so far because there are many more women writing and women directing, women producing, and people are finally catching on to the fact that women want to go and buy tickets to see female characters and more than one in a film. So I actually think it's a very fertile time to be a woman over 40.

Abortion is a hard thing for Hollywood to deal with because it is so controversial and you don't want to alienate half your audience by sending one message or the other.