I grew up watching foreign programs - American, English, Mexican, and very little Kenyan. 'The Color Purple' was the first time I saw people who looked like me.

What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion: for yourself and for those around you.

I have always loved children. I've been fantasizing about motherhood since I was probably 2 ½. I loved to babysit my cousins, and nieces, you know.

I come from a loving, supportive family, and my mother taught me that there are more valuable ways to achieve beauty than just through your external features. She was focused on compassion and respect, and those are the things that ended up translating to me as beauty.

I never, in my wildest dreams, could I have thought that the first role I get out of school would lead to an Oscar nomination.

Whoopi Goldberg looked like me, she had hair like mine, she was dark like me. I'd been starved for images of myself. I'd grown up watching a lot of American TV.

That you will feel the validation of your external beauty but also get to the deeper business of being beautiful inside. There is no shade in that beauty.