Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years

I know that I am—all that I am. And all that I am is full and ripe.   All that I am is standing still, waiting and watching and bursting with life.   Holding the straining seams of my skin, my passion and wit and my sanity in.   Waiting for someone to soothe and to say “I understand. You’re home.

I’ve come to realize that home is a feeling as much as it is a place; it is as much about loving what I do as being where I am.

Dancers can look at a mirror, a writer can look at a page, and a painter can look at a canvas and see their work reflected back at them. But singers can only hear and feel what they are doing. After all the training, technique, use of breath, and placement of sound, it boils down to an emotional response to music and lyrics---and the way they touch one's heart and soul.

All my life I have struggled with making decisions—which I blame on being a true Libra—

home is a feeling as much as it is a place; it is as much about loving what I do as being where I am.

I think, when singing, one exposes one’s soul,” I said. “How so?” I struggled to explain. “Dancers can look at a mirror, a writer can look at a page, and a painter can look at a canvas and see their work reflected back at them. But singers can only hear and feel what they are doing. After all the training, technique, use of breath, and placement of sound, it boils down to an emotional response to music and lyrics—and the way they touch one’s heart and soul.

I was anxious to take some action that I could control; to establish something that was mine alone.

Karen, who played Jane, was only seven years old, but was calm and sweet, and had perfect manners. Her father, Roy Dotrice, was a well-known English actor, so Karen had been schooled in performance etiquette.

suddenly remembered that when I portrayed Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on Broadway, I unconsciously toed-in, giving the flower girl a slightly pigeon-toed lack of grace in her clumsy boots, then I straightened my feet when she acquired confidence and poise as a “lady.” It made me smile to think I was doing the exact opposite for Mary Poppins.