I was so lucky. I was very broke and I was taking classes at Lee Strasberg's Institute and I saw a 3 X 5 index card on the bulletin board advertising for college-aged girls for a film. That was Animal House.

A lot of times when I've been offered film series and stuff, if they shoot in Los Angeles, I lose interest.

Eventually you love people - friends or lovers - because of their flaws.

I thought, I need to reinvent myself. I want every day of life to be wonderful, fascinating, interesting, creative. And what am I gonna do to make that happen?

I was quite eager to work, anytime somebody was offering me a job, if I liked the role. Because I was always very discriminating from the very beginning, in the sense that I had absolutely no problem saying no to jobs when they came along if somehow they didn't fit into my universe - whatever that was.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, there was such a variety and diversity of types of films that you could see. So many of them were really more about the human condition and about relationships between people, and they were smaller films that had a much greater impact on me as a human being.

I've had so many people just come up to me and say, 'When you came up on the screen, everybody in the theater applauded.' It's just so sweet, really.