Actor Roundup: What Is Your Earliest Memory Of Wanting To Be An Actor?

“I performed The Pilgramage Play at the Ford Theater in 1949 with my mother, when I was four-and-a-half, five years old. I enjoyed what I was doing on stage. I got to be held in the arms of Jesus. That I liked. I had a line. That I liked … Following the temple scene, I'd change clothes and my grandmother and I would go to the top of the theater and watch everything right through to the resurrection. That gave me a better idea of how big and colorful this thing was, and that I was a part of something that was so great. That made me happy. I loved the experience and looked forward to doing it again. So that was kind of the twilight of [my wanting to be an actor].”

“I went to college for marine biology, then I did a graduate degree, kind of in the same field. And then I got a call to move out West to be curator of an aquarium on an island off the coast of Canada. So I moved out there and did that. This put me at an age where I was kind of outside school and seeing what the real world was like and what the job opportunities were really like for a marine biologist. And I'd always had a bug to act. I was a total ham, loved making people laugh, and I realized the bug was really still there. I thought, ‘Well, it’s going to have to be now or never!’ I moved to Vancouver, I got a bartending job because it allowed me the time to audition and study, and I started taking as many [acting] classes as I could.”

“I did a play when I was in sixth grade, can’t remember exactly which one it was but I remember I only had two lines. And I made it a goal of mine to get as many laughs as I could with these two lines, which I’m sure my teacher was not too happy about. But I did it anyway, got the whole audience to crack and remembered that feeling of looking out at the crowd laughing and thought ‘This is pretty cool.’ Got the bug immediately.”

“The acting bug didn’t hit me until my senior year in high school. We were studying Shakespeare, and our teacher (quite correctly) said that the only way to learn Shakespeare is to perform it. To make a long story short, I played Macbeth, and it was only when I was performing for the class and in the middle of this huge monologue that I realized how much I loved it.”

“I was maybe six or seven. I was always very aware of the fact that I wanted to be doing some type of performing, because Jim Carrey, Jim Varney, Adam Sandler, Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball were all my idols. I loved watching Ace Ventura and the Ernest movies. I remember watching I LOVE LUCY, watching her do the chocolate factory [bit] and stomping the grapes for the wine. I knew how much comedy made me feel seen and how safe acting felt … I was very aware that I wanted to do the same things that brought me that kind of joy, and I felt very connected to those people. I remember being like, ‘That's a job? You get paid to play pretend? I want to do that.’ ”

“In elementary school, I wanted to be Stephanie on FULL HOUSE. Jodie Sweetin played her and I would write letters to Jodie and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen [who played Michelle], and it was a fine line between being a super fan and thinking it would be really cool to play these characters.”

“My parents did musicals with the community theater where I grew up. I just knew that whatever was going on there looked really fun! I remember I wanted to be in the Carol Burnett sketches and I wanted to be Samantha Stevens from BEWITCHED. So, I was around musical theater a lot and I watched a lot of TV and I loved going to the movies. I don’t know that I thought about it as acting, but I wanted to be in the screen with them, in their lives.”

“My mom told me that when I was little, I came up to her and was like, ‘I want to be a movie star,’ when I was super-young, probably four or five. I have no recollection of that, but that’s the story that my family tells!”