Growing up Mormon, you learn how to be very, very organized, and it's a passionate group. I mean, in that way, it's prepared me very well for Hollywood.

You know, growing up Mormon, I always got the sense that it was hard for the leaders of the church to feel like they were outside of Christianity. I think, you know Mormon people believe that they are Christian, and a lot of people outside of the Mormon Church, you know, don't see them that way.

Mom got very heated about the new government policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. In her view it was going to allow closeted gay people into her military and she was really against it... she just assumed I agreed with her opinions.

Eventually my courageous Mom did something we do all too rarely. She got on a plane and she came to see me in L.A. - this place where we'd always been told sinners lived. She came to see my gay friends.

I grew up in a family that had young people adopted from all over the world.

I went to an ordinary school in New York City with no other actors. I learned to compartmentalise different parts of my life. I was one person at home and then another person at work and for that reason my career didn't challenge my family life.

I had a dozen years to act before starting a family, then found that motherhood dwarfed everything else. Once or twice a year, I take a project that appeals to me for its redeeming social value.

As you are not yet married, and as marriage is the fundamental state of life as well as the unity of the commonwealth, make up your mind whether you are called to this state. If you make up your mind to marry, do not marry merely a good wife: marry a good mother to your children.