Mira Sorvino (Actor)

"I was too tall in high school. At 13, I was 5'9-the tallest kid in my class. I'd walk down the halls feeling like a giraffe. Being famous is like being too tall in high school, Sometimes I feel that way even today. it's not that big a problem. I'm not phobic or anything. But, if I look back, there were times when it was difficult for me to behave the right way." - Sorvino on fame to Movieline magazine, October 2002

"My father did not want me to be a child actor, did not want me to audition for things. I was actually offered a part by Diane Ladd to play her daughter on a television series but my father wouldn't let me. I'm glad about that now because I had a normal childhood, I had a lot of chances to try and do other things and Harvard was like an extended version of that. Then I could go and see whether acting was for me or maybe just a childish notion." - Sorvino quoted in Empire magazine, July 1998

How an early reading of Irving Stone's "The Agony and the Ecstacy" affected her take on sexuality: "In it Michelangelo is described as being bisexual. I thought, Oh I could understand that. What if you just fell in love with somebody who was of your same gender? It's not something you can help. Having an attraction for someone is ineluctable.

"I honestly have not been attracted to women, but I thought it would be possible because of that book. I could imagine that some person would walk into my life one day that I'd fall in love with, and it would be a woman. As a teenager I used to worry about it because I thought it would be a big problem for my family and confusing for me. I used to be very fond of people on a platonic level to the point where I'd wonder, Is this love ... sexual? But it never had a physical correspondence. I know now I'm pretty damned heterosexual. It's not hard to fall for men. It's actually alarmingly easy." - Sorvino quoted in The Advocate, April 2, 1996

Sorvino is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and also speaks French.