Sean Hepburn Ferrer Quotes

My father was a difficult and demanding man.

We weren’t a home-movie kind of a family. When that’s your work and you have to do it for a living, when it’s Christmastime, you don’t want to see a camera in the room.

In her heart my mother much preferred the intense few days of shelling, which brought freedom, to the languishing fear she felt every time she stood by waiting for the Nazi troops and later for the SS to march by, singing their songs of victory and supremacy.

We’re fortunate to have this extraordinary foundation of, I guess, not growing up in Hollywood and growing up in this farmhouse in Switzerland. She wanted a normal life for herself and for us. And it’s a valuable and beautiful memory that she left us.

I don’t feel like so many other celebrities’ kids, who hate their parents for abandoning them.

I read an article some years back in which Emma Thompson demeaned my mother’s acting ability. My mother would be the first person to say that she wasn’t the best actress in the world. But she was a movie star.

President Kennedy visited once, but that was in Switzerland and I remember the Secret Service men dressed in black swarming about the house.

My mother believed strongly that every life matters. She demonstrated on a daily basis, particularly through her humanitarian work as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, her strong belief in the value of every life.

I believe my mother’s immune system was harmed because of all the vaccinations she needed to visit different countries, when her body was already weakened after an impoverished wartime childhood.

I don’t know if my mum and President Kennedy ever dated, but they were friends and there are some letters from him that she kept – sweet and innocent letters saying, ‘Saw you in the play the other night and you were fantastic.’

I’m often asked what it was like to have a famous mother. I always answer that I really don’t know. I knew her first as my mother, and then as my best friend. Only after that did I understand that she was an actress, and with time that she was truly an exceptional actress.

Sometimes I will discover a whole shoot of my mother I have never seen before.

I saw both sides, I saw normality in Switzerland as a kid and later on I saw the insanity of it all in Italy, which almost becomes hard to live with.

We tend to perceive Hollywood as an industry that is trying to mitigate risk more and more.

My stepfather was a brilliant and funny psychiatrist but he was a hound dog. He just didn’t know how to be faithful.

Soon we moved to Rome and I got a little bit of a sense I was different because the paparazzi would follow me when I went to buy books or socks. But my mother never behaved like a movie star.

I also was deeply touched by ‘The Nun’s Story’ because it was the first time I saw my mother in something other than a romantic comedy.

Our mother believed in education above all.

We are brought together by the great feelings and it is the little stuff that breaks us apart.

We all came from a culture of you got to keep moving, you got to keep doing.

Once the war started, my grandfather went to England, where he was under house arrest on the Isle of Man, and then to Ireland, but not to Germany. In no way did he, or my grandmother for that matter, ever support either the war or the Holocaust.

She trained as a ballet dancer yet she was an iron fist in a velvet glove. My younger brother Luca and I had a wonderful childhood since she would try to guide us gently down the right path.

She was a wonderful mother. She was my best friend. Same for my brother. And it’s funny because we didn’t grow up in Hollywood. You know, once she decided that she needed to be a mother, she really gave up her career.

I think that’s the greatest gift she gave us, this normal upbringing without her fame hanging over our heads. It actually prepared us for the world.

She lost a couple of pregnancies before me. It was sort of this great healing for her to finally have a child.

I grew up in the countryside as a normal kid.

I didn’t end her career. She chose to have children, then to make the simple choice that everyone should make really. You can’t be a movie star and have children and not have one of the two suffer.

I’m always opening magazines and seeing pictures of her in advertisements. Or I’ll be in a hotel room in Tokyo and there she will be, on the television. Or I’ll be walking through an airport or driving along a freeway and there she will be on a billboard.

I didn’t grow up in Hollywood – the place, or the state of mind.

People say to me, ‘What do you think your mother would think about this new world with Instagram?’ And I pause and I just say, ‘Well, she really was the queen of Instagram because she was more photographed than anyone else.’

When I had to go to school and could no longer travel to be with her on the set, she gave up her career. She felt the most valuable thing was family.

I find that ‘Taare Zameen Par’ is one of the most beautiful movies ever made about the inner world of a child.

One of the reasons that fascism ascended to power so quickly was that it was considered socially elegant to support this new way of government.