Dr. Alton Ochsner certainly was, from a surgical standpoint, my mentor, and the one who influenced me more than anyone else. He was also, like my father, a very strict disciplinarian, and a perfectionist. I liked the way he did things, even though he made you toe the mark. He was almost like a father to me. Took me under his wing, and helped me in every possible way, especially in the research laboratory. He was a brilliant researcher himself. I learned a great deal from him, in terms of how you develop yourself, how you conduct yourself, and the importance of experience and the importance of doing things until you do it perfectly. He had a great influence on me. I am really indebted to his memory, for what he did for me.

When I became a professional actor I was fortunate to be given my first job there by a director called Jonathan Petherbridge.…He instilled in me a way of thinking about acting, which was about as far away from it being a vain occupation as possible, in that drama has significant possibilities for change in society, however small.

There were some high school teachers. I remember a math teacher, Mr. Ewen — actually a math teacher in eighth grade, Mrs. Matwell, who got excited about my ideas and wanted to listen to them. My mother actually was kind of a fan of my ideas and would listen to them. Marvin Minsky I actually communicated with in high school and came to visit him, came up to Boston, and to my delight, took me, a high school student, as seriously as he would take a professor. I mean, that is his approach. He treats everybody the same. I think he really doesn’t care if somebody’s a professor or a high school student. He’s very excited with ideas and very honest with his reactions. But that encouragement was important to me.

Donald Crouch in high school said, “Do you like these words?” I was then writing words of my own. He said, “Do you like these words? Do you like the way they sound in your head?” He said, “Well, they sound ten times better when you give ’em out in the air. It’s too bad you can’t say these words.” He began to challenge me, to nudge me toward speaking again, and by using my own poetry — and then other poets because he himself was a compatriot of Robert Frost, he himself was a poet. He himself said he learned a poem a day. In case he went blind, he’d have a whole book of poems in his head. And he nudged me toward that, toward acknowledging and appreciating the beauty of words.