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1. The thing I get the most that I really love is that people don’t so much mention films I’ve been in or shows I’ve been in as they say, instead, ‘I love you. I just love your perseverance.’ That really pleases me.
2. I was brought up on animal grease.
3. I’m one of those performers who has done just about everything except juggle, and I’m working on that.
4. I never had an easy time making friends in the past, for many reasons. I didn’t go into therapy for nothing.
5. I was always typecast as a Latina.
6. There is something about sex that always brings out the funny in me. I think it’s because we make such fools of ourselves over it.
7. ‘LIFE Magazine’ decided to do a story about a young actress in Hollywood in 1954. And I made the cover. And I remember that the fellow who was doing the story on me said, ‘Listen, kid, I just want you to know, if Eisenhower gets a cold, you’re off the cover.’
8. I am able to get up and dust myself off and keep moving forward. I’m very stubborn.
9. I don’t want to miss out on my grandchildren and my daughter, and doing Broadway would do just that.
10. It’s kind of heartbreaking when I talk about it now, I still get very moved by the lack of opportunities that were available to myself and to the very few others who were Hispanic young actresses.
11. Is there a grandmother that isn’t spunky on television? Is there such a creature?
12. My idol when I was a kid was Elizabeth Taylor.
13. I am not exactly Mrs. Good Housekeeping, although I love to cook, bake, even iron, but only because it’s not mandatory.
14. Lupe Velez was way before me; Dolores Del Rio was way before me, so I had no one. So the only one I could think of that I identified with was this gorgeous creature named Elizabeth Taylor, so she became my role model.
15. I grew up as a child who felt she was very inferior to everyone else.
16. I was the artsy one, and my husband took care of all our finances. It was the Latino way — the man is in charge of the money.
17. My best work happened on the stage.
18. I have played Polynesian. I have played an Arabian girl. I played an East Indian girl. And what was so confusing about that, which I mention in my book, is that I assumed I had to have an accent. Nobody said anything, so I made up what I call the universal ethnic accent, and they all sounded alike. It didn’t matter who I was playing.
19. I get embarrassed when I go to an actor or actress’s home and it’s filled with pictures of them.
20. ‘Revolutionary Road’ with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet absolutely destroys me. They were both so wonderful in it.