Talent Development Resources...........early life: page 3

 

.. .. "My parents thought it was nice to develop my imagination, but they never seriously thought that anything would ever come of it," says Nicole Kidman.  "By the time I was a teenager, I had developed skills as a writer, and my father encouraged me to think about a career in journalism. I began keeping a diary, which I maintain to this day."

By puberty, she towered above most of the other girls and boys in her class and thought of herself as "the ugliest person alive on earth." She found release in acting class, pretending to be other people. On weekends, when most kids were at the beach, Kidman was often alone on the stage of the school theater.  "I would just lock myself in there," she says. "I thought it was fantastic having that stage all to myself. I'd be teased about going off to the theater instead of the beach with everyone else.  I felt like an outsider, but it is character building not to be a pretty child who just bats her eyes and gets her way." At fourteen, she landed her first professional role... by the time she turned seventeen, she had left school to spend seven months on a film for Disney called Five Mile Creek. ... [Cosmopolitan, Jul 1991]

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In high school, I played Nora in Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House". It is one of the best roles for a woman ever written, I think. Learning that play and having the chance to play her made me want to be an actress. That role made me believe in the power of theater to express great ideas. I want to play roles like that. Second in line would be Nancy Thompson [in Nightmare on Elm Street]. Like I said, every girl wishes she could fight Freddy and win (or at least put up a good fight!). ... I just can't believe I got to be part of that pivotal film. I am still surprised by its success. .... Heather Langenkamp .. [The Arrow interview] ....---Four Major Plays: A Doll's House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, the Master Builder.... // ....Nightmare on Elm Street  [dvd]

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I have always wanted to act ever since I was a little girl. I would put a blanket under my shirt and pretend that I was pregnant. Then, I would go through childbirth...  I was, like, three. Dakota Fanning ... [at age 7] ...[etonline.com Dec. 12, 2001]

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I moved to the United States from Japan when I was five years old, after my parents divorced.  ... To my knowledge, I was the only person of color in the entire town of 14,000 people... school was a string of disasters.  I got beat up in the bathroom so many times that I developed a huge and resilient bladder, which could go an entire school day without needing to be relieved.  Strange kids would call me "Jap" or "Nip" or "Yellow-bellied murderer." Groups of older students would corner me in the hallway..  I carry scars from my two years in Marshfield, and the absence of things that are irretrievably lost. ... But there were positive elements to my experience in Marshfield, too.  The hours I spent locked inside, reading, or making up stories, or listening to my grandfather's tales, were training time, apprenticeship, for my eventually becoming a writer.   Nina Revoyr - from her essay: Foreigner in Marshfield

For me, writing this book was an act of recovery - both in terms of basketball, and in terms of Los Angeles... I missed both of those things tremendously.  And it was very important to me to show an inner city L.A. that might be rough and dangerous, but was also beautiful. ... The book isn't "about" being gay, or "about" being Asian-American, or "about" growing up in the city. It's about all of those things.  And I feel very lucky to be writing at a time when I can use a lesbian protagonist to explore stories and situations that deal with something more than just sexual identity.  Nina Revoyr - from Stonewall Inn interview ---The Necessary Hunger: A Novel

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..

Actor Sam Rockwell, star of a new movie about Chuck Barris -- the former "Gong Show" host and self-proclaimed CIA assassin -- had some dark days of his own as a teenager. The 34-year-old wound up at an Outward Bound-style alternative high school because "I just wanted to get stoned, flirt with girls, go to parties." The school, known as Urban Pioneers, "had a reputation as a place stoners went because it was easy to graduate," he said. But instead, the experience turned him around, and after graduation, he turned to acting, moving to New York to study and be near his mother, Penny Rockwell, an actress and artist. "I always romanticized my mother's lifestyle, the life of an actor, and even a struggling actor," he told the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday. "I just felt there was so much adventure in New York, and that's the kind of life I wanted to have." [Assoc. Press Dec 23 2002] I was a bit rebellious [as a child]. I was young and angry and all of that stuff.[Flaunt, Nov 2000] photo top left from "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind"

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.. .. As Drew's acting career took off, doors opened... including the doors of late night clubs where she was a party girl, trying desperately to keep up with her older friends.  Out of control, she used drinks and drugs to numb her painful feelings, often to the point of passing out.  Drew Barrymore began the process of rebuilding her self-esteem at a rehabilitation clinic, at age thirteen. from her autobiography  Little Girl Lost

Drew Barrymore: I learned at a really young age that you cannot control people or nature and how it evolves. It's an impossible task, and you will drive yourself nuts trying to do it. Interview mag. / Ingrid Sischy: Did you try to when you were younger? Drew Barrymore: Yeah. When you're growing up, you try to control the people who are closest to you, usually your family, which is always the hardest thing to deal with. When it comes to the impossibility of controlling others, I think you get your first dose of human reality. Ingrid Sischy: Would you say that the early experience of realizing you couldn't control other people made you unable to control your own behavior for a while? And then, when you realized you couldn't control others, you realized you could control yourself and started wanting to live? Drew Barrymore: Yes. We all have the desire within us to control, and we all have the capacity to lose control. Control is something that we can't get rid of. We can lessen it or make it bigger. I think the point is to exercise control in the positive realm, whether it has to do with yourself or other things. But then there's also the line between change and control.  I think you should try to change things rather than control them if you believe so strongly in them.  [Interview, May, 1995]

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gifted/talented people & "problem" behavior ~ ~ Gifted people are found in jail, just as they are everywhere else. However, they form a disproportionately larger portion of the prison population, perhaps as much as 20 percent... in conrast to the 3 to 5 percent of the general public who are gifted. from book: Gifted Grownups: The Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential by Marylou Kelly Streznewski ~ ~ We are urging parents to remove their children from a system that is ignorant of their special needs. Since the schools belong to the people and are existing to assist our children to become happy, educated Americans, we insist that individual differences must be recognized and developed. To continue to support systems that cater to conformity and mediocrity is to encourage delinquency. Marie Friedel, Executive Director, NFGCC The National Foundation for Gifted and Creative Children ~ ~ The research on delinquency among gifted students, like that on suicide, suggests no higher incidence than among other youngsters. Psychological problems can manifest themselves into anti-social and illegal behavior. Especially in the teenage environment, acceptance trumps reason and safety. There is some information based on self-reports by gifted students that they commit offenses, but are seldom caught or taken to court. from article: Counseling Gifted and Talented Students by Nicholas Colangelo [in newsletter of The National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented] ~ ~ These children can be both exhilarating and exhausting. But because parents often lack information about characteristics of gifted children, the relationship between parent and child can suffer. The child's behaviors are seen as mischievous, impertinent, weird, or strong-willed, and the child often is criticized or punished for behaviors that really represent curiosity, intensity, sensitivity, or the lag of judgment behind intellect. Thus, intense power struggles, arguments, temper tantrums, sibling rivalry, withdrawal, underachievement, and open flaunting of family and societal traditions may occur within the family. from article: Mis-Diagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children: Gifted and LD, ADHD, OCD,  Oppositional Defiant Disorder by James T. Webb, Ph.D.

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--by James Ellroy L.A. Confidential   // My Dark Places: An  L.A. Crime Memoir

James Ellroy claims to have been turned on to crime fiction by the Hardy Boys. At the age of ten, his father bought him Jack Webb's The Badge:a history of the LAPD. ... As an attention-starved adolescent, he mailed Nazi pamphlets to girls he liked, criticized JFK and advocated the reinstatement of slavery. ... He was a big fan of "The Fugitive" TV series in the early sixties and was obsessed with crime novels and movies in his late teens. When he wasn't reading crime novels, he was shoplifting food and porno magazines. ... He was eventually expelled from Fairfax high school for ranting about Nazism in his English class.  Soon after, he joined the army... he faked a stutter and convinced the army psychiatrist that he was not mentally fit for combat. After three months, he received a dishonorable discharge. ... landed himself in juvenile hall trying to steal a steak from a Liquor & Food Mart. ... When he turned eighteen, he was back on the streets.. lived in parks and Goodwill bins.. broke into the homes of girls he liked and stole their underwear. He drank, experimented with drugs, and read hundreds of crime novels. ...  Fearing for his sanity, he joined AA and got sober. He earned steady money as a golf caddy and began to mentally formulate a mystery plot, which would become Brown's Requiem. At the age of thirty, he wrote and sold his first novel. from biography on his site

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In school, teachers complained about his doodling and daydreaming.
They said he seemed 'unwilling to conform to the ordinary methods of learning.' ...
A key to his success was his realization that his creativity was worth gold. He guarded it carefully.

  from "Imagineer Walt Disney" by Adrienne Fox, Investor's Business Daily, March 9, 1998
 

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Jeff Bezos (head of Amazon.com) was caught skipping school,
and found in the library, working on his science fair project.  [cnn.com]
 

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Alfred Hitchcock was jailed at age 6 for "being naughty." [amctv.com profile]
 

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I was hoping that through helping people see the beauty in themselves, I could try and find it in me. Growing up, I was shy and effeminate and was therefore considered ugly. Other kids threw that word at me a lot... So my perception of myself was hideous. ... A teacher of mine wanted all of us to be safe and boring.. said I was the devil because I wanted to have an exciting life. But I never believed her. I always knew I was right. Kevyn Aucoin*****[Interview magazine] *--book:*-Making Faces by Kevyn Aucoin

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Al Pacino.. has penned a piece for Esquire's July issue on his early acting days. "I was homeless at the time. I would sometimes sleep at night in the theater where I performed," Pacino wrote.  "It was hard, but at that age, you can sleep anywhere. At the time, I even thought it was cool. I was alive to what I was doing."    Liz Smith column, LA Times June 11 2002 *--bio:*--Life on the Wire: The Life and Art of Al Pacino by Andrew Yule

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[Do you feel you missed your childhood?] Diane Lane: No I don't. Not at all. I think childhood is, well... how do you say what childhood should be? It's a flow, the development of an individual. Children can grow up all kinds of ways and until somebody tells them, they don't know it wasn't normal.  When someone comes around and points the finger and says "this is different than something else," do you have anything to start comparing it to. So, in that way, maybe I did miss some of my childhood, my eyes were opened pretty early because of my parents separating and I was never really with them together.  That was a process that matured me to become an actress at a young age. It wasn't the job that did it, it was my family life. I was more analytical and astute. People don't like astute children, so I would have to button my lip.  .. [Venice Mag. June 1995]

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When I was 12, I [auditioned] for Alice in Wonderland ... and felt completely like I didn't know what I was doing and that I had failed and I didn't get cast, and then kind of gave it up for a while. ... it obviously wasn't something that I was gonna be good at because I didn't get cast this one time ..  [I found out later I was second runner-up for the role] ... But it's just interesting I think how our perspective of things can get the better of us sometimes. I mean to me, that was a failure that kept me away from [acting] for a few years.    Gillian Anderson    [from interview on "Exhale with Candice Bergen" Feb, 15, 2000]

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In school, my professors came to me and said, "You're at a crossroads -- you're a good artist, and you're a good actress. What do you want to do?" Because they're both very hard disciplines, to really immerse myself, I had to decide, and I chose acting. Painting was something I was just learning. I did it on my own and used it as an outlet to express very deep and personal feelings.  With acting, I started very young, and I'd performed for a lot of children in boarding schools, late at night after the dormitory lights were out. I'd have a flashlight, and I'd be Count Dracula, or Shakespeare, or Yogi Bear, and leap from bunk to bunk. I liked the laughter; I loved the way it made people feel.  And applause is the most powerful thing... people talk about the sound of it, but what I hear is glee. CCH Pounder******[from venicemag.com interview by laura grover]

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"At 18, I went to college and it was the perfect environment for me...  To a certain extent I had always been afraid to work as hard as I knew I could,  because I had always been told that I was gifted and special.  If I had to work hard at something, it meant that I wasn't already good at it.  If I wasn't good at it, I wasn't special."   Ashley Judd

~ ~ ~

"[Naomi] Judd points out that her actress daughter, Ashley, was profoundly affected
by reading at the age of 8. Judd says she had her daughter read from "The Chronicles of Narnia,"
C.S. Lewis' seven-volume series of books. "And she will tell you that that's why she's an actress,"
Judd says. "Her imagination just began to flourish. Her creativity blossomed." [CNN Interactive, May.99]
 

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*********************

"My mother [Nancy Carlsson-Paige] is a professor of early childhood development...
[she] had written some books on war play and those cartoons that are like commercials
for action figures. What worried my mother about those shows was not only that they
encouraged violent play, but also hampered creativity. So growing up for me was like
you'd get some blocks and then you'd have to go make up a game.

I was always making up stories and acting out plays; that's just the way I was raised."

Matt Damon - from book: Mark Bego. Matt Damon: Chasing a Dream

book: Nancy Carlsson-Paige Who's Calling the Shots? How to Respond Effectively
to Children's Fascination with War Play and War Toys

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The traditional model of education tends to look at human beings as basically driven by cognition. ... An alternative model of education called "Self Actualization and Interdependence" (SAI), sees education as a global, all-encompassing process of growth. It sees giftedness in an emotional context in which the cognitive is included. ...  views human beings as independent decision-makers, driven by a necessity to be true to themselves.  It embraces the core of who they are and their striving to actualize emotionally, cognitively, consciously, and unconsciously as well as physically. All of these aspects clamor for a place in the world and stem from each personís unique Self... the place from which we see and interpret the world and ourselves.  To understand any human being, any child, and certainly any gifted child, we need to focus on the Self, the inner core. The Self has no choice but to pursue its inner goal, the way a flower must follow its inner destination. from article Giftedness is Heart & Soul by Annemarie Roeper,  CAG Communicator, FALL, 2000    photo from Roeper Consultation Service site

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"In school, teachers complained about his doodling and daydreaming.
They said he seemed 'unwilling to conform to the ordinary methods of learning.' ...
A key to his success was his realization that his creativity was worth gold.
He guarded it carefully."

[from "Imagineer Walt Disney" by Adrienne Fox, Investor's Business Daily, March 9, 1998]

~ ~ ~

"I first realized I was odd when I went to school at the age of five. I thought the teachers
were stupid... insisting I drink milk... insisting on name cards.. insisting you go to the toilet
when you didn't want to, that sort of thing. The reason I felt so odd is because other children
seemed to accept that all this was quite normal, but I didn't."  'eccentric female professor, IQ 150'

*--book:*--David Weeks. Eccentrics
 

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**************

"The talents she honed -- gardening, sewing, cooking -- were not idle weekend diversions  but practical necessities for making ends meet. .. A woman who made her own dresses  throughout high school understands not just the pride of craftsmanship  but the importance of doing the job right the first time."  from "She's Martha and You're Not" by Mary Elizabeth Williams [salon.com]

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 We do have a lot of gifted students who come to us, and oftentimes it's because they feel
they weren't recognized or supported in public schools, and, worse than that, sometimes
they actually experienced a negative environment in which to learn."

  Marilyn Mosley [Director of Laurel Springs School in Ojai, California]   [from interview]

~ ~ ~ ~

"Schools may not be the best place to develop exceptional talent, according to a study
by Dr. Benjamin S. Bloom, Professor of Education at Northwestern University and the
University of Chicago." from Schooling Counter to Talent Development?

~ ~ ~ ~

Roberta Guaspari: "Music is not a frill, not just entertainment. An art form requires that you study
in a serious way, and you learn from that process. .. we're not addressing the inner, spiritual part
of a child... that appreciates and responds to the possibilities of art. .. "Music," Guaspari says,
"teaches discipline, poise, self-respect, and the payoff of hard work -- all valuable life lessons."

  (subject of film "Music of the Heart" starring Meryl Streep) [Kansas City Star, 1999]

     "Music of the Heart"  book---|---video
 
 
 

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There is a Fool in each of us, you know.A rash, brash, harebrained, audacious, imprudent,
ill-suited, spontaneous, impolitic, daredevil Fool, which, in most of us, was long ago hog-tied
and locked in the basement.

If you want to see a full-fledged Fool in action,Watch an undisciplined child.
(The more undisciplined, the better!)

Oblivious to concepts of appropriate behavior, driven by rampant curiosity and innocent lust.
Raw genius, resolutely stumbling into hurt and wondrous discovery.

Inspired, annoying, rapturous, petulant. The creative savage of our being.

    from Gordon MacKenzie  Orbiting the Giant Hairball :
        A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving With Grace)
 

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**************

"I've always been this kind of feisty, sassy outlaw. I was always leading walk-outs at school  and holding picket signs. I was never asked to jump on other people's bandwagons so I  just started building my own and asked people to jump on mine."   Camryn Manheim  [Back Stage West, 3.9-15.00]

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"I tried to make myself nun material. But the cards seemed to be unfairly stacked against me:
I was driven by the itchy kind of curiosity that eclipsed good sense and continually got me into
hot water, I tended to be forgetful or preoccupied, I found things funny when other people didn't,
and in the face of wall-to-wall rules that were trivial and pointless, my instinct was to rebel."

 Mia Farrow  (about attending an English convent school)

  from her book: What Falls Away: A Memoir
 

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*********

"I didn't discover I was an artist until I was 17... it's very hard to be an artist and a child; it was like having sand up your butt when you go to the beach."   Alfre Woodard

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***

"I was a bad student, I daydreamed in class, wrote stories in my notebooks. I learned the basics, but most of my active intellectual life was outside of school. It was acutely painful because [my sister and I] felt different, like misfits. Our individuality was almost irrepressible, but I wanted to fit in."  Anne Rice   [Book mag., Sept/Oct.2000]

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*--books
 
 

Teresa M. Amabile  Growing Up Creative : Nurturing a Lifetime of Creativity
'A myth-shattering "how-to" by the established authority in the field that proves creativity
must originate from within the child and shows parents and teachers how to help foster it.
Based on more than 12 years of research with thousands of children, and rich with examples
from real life, here are answers to the questions parents ask most often.' [Amazon.com review]

Barbara Clark  Growing Up Gifted

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly. Being Adolescent - Conflict and Growth in the Teenage Years

Pnina Klein  To Be Young and Gifted
contents includes: Prologues and Caveats; Early signs of Giftedness: Research and Commentary; Creative Giftedness in Children; Cultural Constraints on Cognitive Enrichment; Early Development of Giftedness: A Developmental View... etc.

Alice Miller.  The Drama of the Gifted Child : The Search for the True Self
[Publisher:] "Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents' expectations and win their "love." Alice Miller writes, "When I used the word 'gifted' in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb...Without this 'gift' offered us by nature, we would not have survived." But merely surviving is not enough... [this book] helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth."

Alice Miller.  The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness   "The author examines the childhood experiences of such people as Pablo Picasso, Kathe Kollwitz, Chaim Soutine, Buster Keaton and Friedrich Nietzsche. She seeks to "draw links between childhood traumas that lead . . . {her subjects} to lives that were either creative or destructive."

Frank J. Sulloway  Born to Rebel : Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives   "Sulloway, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has undertaken the first comprehensive study of birth order in determining personality and social outlook. He produces overwhelming evidence that, because of the evolutionary hierarchy in families, first-born children are more likely to be conformists while the later-borns tend to be more creative and more likely to reject the status quo."

James Webb, Stephanie Tolan Guiding the Gifted Child: A Practical Source for Parents and Teachers [Publisher:] "This book has the intent to increase the awareness of parents, teachers and others working with gifted children particularly to recognize that these children and their families have special emotional needs and opportunities that are quite often overlooked and, thus, neglected. Most often this neglect results "only" in unfulfilled potential and missed enjoyments -- but sometimes it leads blatanly to misery and depression."      [also see interview with Stephanie Tolan]
 

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