I feel like God has moved me into a different way of doing things. I teach basic on-camera acting class called Acting 101...In my classroom, the students get every ounce of encouragement and craft and anything I'm able to give them.We have some rules. We don't take the name of The Lord in vain. We don't use foul language when we mess up on camera...There's a climate of safety...They feel very protected.

As I got older, the role that I ended up (playing) on One Life to Live was a mother because, by then, I had a stable marriage - so I thought - and a beautiful son and mother roles became what I was doing well. I was still the Latina mom who very much related to people who love family. All those traditional values (were) coming back into my life.

I was doing big roles and, yeah, everything was going great. In the midst of all that, I guess I had already become common in the sense that I became formed into what the world wanted me to be. My desires and my goals were (identified) by the world - the things that would make me (successful) in the sight of the world and would give me a status that I thought was security.

You get typecast. You have to find a niche in this business. So, the roles that I got cast in were the Latina or the Italian spitfires. The woman with a passion and the woman who didn't want to listen to anyone, did everything her own way, very self-willed.

The experience I had all those 40 years of working on Broadway and working on television, I bring it to students and I let them kind of drain me dry but they all feel at the end of the class that they are getting so much out of it. The students grow in my classroom because they feel safe. They don't feel like they're going to be yelled at.

Actors are always the pawns. They're the last ones in the food chain.

In grammar school, I went to eight o'clock mass pretty much like four days a week.