There was something in the bel canto, not just opera, but a certain style of Italian singing that I responded to deeply.

I've been going around the world; I've been to China, I sang at the General Assembly, the Security Council.

Oddly enough, my mother was born in Southampton. I have roots in Southampton, Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor. My grandfather, her father, Stefano Rullo, when he came from Naples, he went to Pennsylvania and worked coal mines.

In an Italian household, there were two figures for me growing up - you had the Pope and you had Frank Sinatra, and, of course, Tony Bennett. And not necessarily in that order.

Here I was in Estonia, doing a concert for 5,000 people, and not many people know the song My Way - Gorbachev in the 80s, My Way had just become a famous song, and [Mikhail] Gorbachev in a satirical, kind of cynical manner coined the term the Sinatra Doctrine and My Way was the song because the Baltic states in the Warsaw Pact wanted to go their own way and secede from the Soviet Union, so joking he says," Yeah, we've got the Sinatra Doctrine now."

I didn't want to become this stiffened - and that was just a personal choice, at that time. And, the idea was also to go to film first, get enough notoriety in film that I could interpret some of the opera stuff the way I would want to interpret it.

You have to have a certain kind of celebrity to pull something that big together, but I had a whole thing called The Spirit of Man that I wanted to do worldwide concerts in celebration for the spirit of man. So, as I move forward, that would be the kind of thing that I have.