At 16, my key mission was survival.Because I was so dyslexic. And so filled with shame. I could not do what every other student in my class was doing. But my passion was to do exactly what I’m doing now. I dreamed of acting 24 hours a day. I would daydream, I would night dream, I would dinner dream! My heroes were Spencer Tracy, Steve McQueen, Humphrey Bogart, Charles Bronson – acting was always there, I don’t even know how or why. It had eight tentacles, and they were wrapped around my imagination.
And I was not successful in most of them. By the early ’60s, I was in college, I was pretty good socially and I used my humour to infiltrate. But I still always felt ‘less than’. So I was torn. Because what the world saw was a very confident young man. And when I was back in my dorm room in college, I was like