My parents were both from extremely different backgrounds. My father's Italian, my mother was of Swedish descent. They're both first-generation Americans.
Temperamentally, Sam and I are very much alike. He's a lawyer, my father's a lawyer, and I always wanted to play one. On so many levels the role just felt right. I fell in love with it as I would a woman.
I didn't have parents, so I lived in people's homes... And because I grew up with no parental role models, I learned to become my own friend, eventually my own father and my own mother.
He learned through the way that my father and I felt about his songs, his country songs, that they were great songs. And then he went out and sang them for the audiences that we found, and he found a tremendous reaction to that.
I had to get in touch with the source, I had to go back into my abandonment issues with my mother, I had to go into issues with my father I hadn't even looked at before.
My father died in 1930, but if you told him or anybody almost in that time that you'd be able to sit back in England and watch a cricket game in Australia, they'd have you put in the loony bin.
