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Robert Strauss
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Robert Strauss: My mother was the major inspiration in my life, not my father. I got along with him well, but he was not very strong. My mother was strong and kind, and I guess we never had a cross word. She used to worry that I was studying too much, and my father used to say, "Good God Almighty! How can you say he's studying too much? He never does anything but run around, and he makes terrible grades, and you tell him not to study so much." And her answer would be, "Well, you know, if he starts worrying about his grades, he'll get an ulcer, and I don't want him to lose his health. He's got such a long life ahead of him, and he's going into politics and diplomacy." So she had already begun to carve out -- that's the inspiration I had. Instead of a teacher, it was my mother.
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Robert Strauss
Presidential Medal of Freedom
I came from a Jewish family, and my parents lived, as I said, in West Texas, and I had a grandmother who lived in Forth Worth, and on one of the high holidays in the fall, the family would all come to Fort Worth, and we would spend a day or so with my grandmother, who came from Germany and who was very German -- in fact, we called her grossmama not "grandmother." But when they would gather around there, my mother would always say, "My son Bobby is going to be a diplomat, and he's going into politics, and he'll be the first Jewish Governor of the State of Texas." I can remember being 14 years old, 12, 13 years old maybe, in that age, and walking into the room, and one of my uncles would say, "Well, here comes the Governor," and they would all laugh, and I could have killed the sonofabitches. But my mother ignored them totally. She would just smile. And she wasn't far wrong; I had a successful political career.
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Hilary Swank
Two Oscars for Best Actress
As a child, I felt like an outsider, and that's not just specific to me. I think everyone has felt like that at one point or another in their life, but for me, I would read books and watch movies, and in that way, I would feel understood. I felt like characters were going through something I was going through, or that would make me feel, "Oh, there's someone in the world that is understanding," and they almost became like they were my friends. And when I realized that it was something I could do with my life -- that I could become an actor and tell these stories, that I could continue to learn about myself in a deeper way, that I could entertain at the same time, and hopefully give that to another child or person and just continue to learn about the human experience -- it was really my draw to become an actor and how I describe what movies are.
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