Camryn Manheim

Waiting, waiting, waiting. All my life, I've been waiting for my life to begin, as if somehow my life was ahead of me, and that someday I would arrive at it.

For a long time, I really struggled with the idea of being an actor because I really felt that I should be in the Peace Corps.

I think Ellenor is embarrassed and ashamed and has devoted all of her energy to the law and to helping other people get justice because it's too difficult for her to face her own struggle for justice.

When it comes to boys and her weight, I think Ellenor is much more conservative than I am, and she has not had the dialogue I have had about my weight.

The character I play is a wonderful compilation of things I hate about myself and things I love about myself and things that I've invented to make her even more interesting than me.

So to me, fat just seems to be right to the point and the most descriptive way to say it.

I've always thought of fat as just a descriptive word.

When I meet large women who walk with confidence and are articulate and really have an understanding of how they walk in this world, I love them so deeply for being able to overcome such unbelievable odds.

I have lived my life in a culture that hates fat people.

I was scared, because I knew that in the political arena, you have to satisfy so many different types of people at once, and I wasn't sure that I could speak for everybody and be politically correct.

Nobody else knew what to do with me because big women are old.

It never occurred to me that I'd be on a television show or in feature films but when those came into play my dreams changed along the way.

One of the things I did when I was in New York, which has a wonderful deaf community, is I have worked on making Broadway more accessible to deaf people.

Both of my parents are professors and everyone in my family has some fabulous degree of something or another and I couldn't get into college because I didn't know a language.

I learned how to sign because when I was growing up in California in order to get into college you needed two semesters of language to get into a University of California school.

It's okay to be a fat man. It's prestige and power and all of that. But fat women are seen as just lazy and stupid and having no self-control.

I placed over a thousand deaf people in jobs throughout my career working for the deaf.

Parents know how to push your buttons because, hey, they sewed them on.

People in this country haven't stopped hating fat people, but they've become more kind to me, since in our culture, even though we hate our fat people, we love our celebrities even more.

So instead of beating myself up for being fat, I think it's a miracle that I laugh every day and walk through my life with pride, because our culture is unrelenting when it comes to large people.