With the help of folks like you and me, Heifer International tackles the problem of hunger one family at a time with gifts of renewable resources - farm animals that are ongoing sources of food and income.

Now, as I move through my fifties, I can be professional and domestic, creative and intellectual, patient and urgent. I have learned that we should never settle for someone else's definition of who we can be. Growing to this age, I realize, is kind of like feeling your voice deepen. It's still your voice, but it has more substance, and it sounds like it knows its own origins.

To each person, their own way of death - with dignity.

When my children wake up in the morning they know they will eat breakfast, get hugs from their parents, go to a good, safe school. Plates are full and store windows are glittering. But at the same time the great majority of the world's children and women stand - no - shiver on the precipice

It's a miracle when something actually turns out well because there are so many ways for it to go wrong.

I've always had a really developed sense of justice. As a child, I would rotate my dolls' dresses for fear that they might come alive at midnight and one of them would always have the best dress on. Whatever it was that made me worry about my dolls I suppose has paid off in my career because, really, an actor is all about empathy and imagination. And those are the cornerstones of activism.

Being a Catholic, I was drawn to the mystery of the Latin and the smoke and the mirrors and all of that. That part of my disposition definitely did lend itself to finding my way to the back door of some artistic pursuit.