Melissa Leo

“I can nap with hustle and bustle around me; I can nap quietly all by myself. It's something I've always been good at.”

“Well, I don't think of myself as a feminist at all. As soon as we start labeling and categorizing ourselves and others, that's going to shut down the world.”

“If I'm going to get an ice cream cone two or three times a week, then it's a pleasure. No guilt.”

“There were not enough women like Kay on TV and now there are none.”

“As an actor, you live a little bit of a cloistered life. It's a lonely life. You oddly, strangely find yourself all alone, quite often, with a lot of time to think.”

“I haven't had a lot of experience with glamour. I've never had to mask myself, as many now not-so-young actresses have had to do. Female actors in that regard have a different lot in life th...”

“I do wish everyone would call me Leo. It's not that I don't like Melissa. But the more I hear it called out, the worse it sounds.”

“I always wanted to play a nun, and to play the Reverend Mother was a thrill of a lifetime for me. But, generations back, my family were not churchgoers, which is an unusual thing in the Unit...”

“You know, when I got started on television in the '80s, you would go to the costume department, and if you were a female they put you into a skirt. And you had a pocketbook, usually a should...”

“I know what it meant to me to play the Reverend Mother, a role I've, in some ways, prepared a lifetime to do. It's why I took the part.”

“I am a smoker, I'm ashamed to say. I had given it up for many years, then picked it up again. It's a horrible habit. I struggle with myself all the time. And I love to smoke.”