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Thandie Newton read novels as a teenager to “make sense” of her hormones.
The actress is known as one of Hollywood’s most intelligent actresses after studying Social Anthropology at the renowned Cambridge University in England.
The Crash star has revealed that she first discovered reading because it allowed her to escape her tricky teenage years.
She was particularly fond of the Thomas Hardy classic, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
“I lost myself in reading as a teen,” she told the January issue of UK Elle magazine. “I wasn’t the girl who boys saw themselves being involved with; I lived in a small town and you weren’t going to go out with black girls. So these sweeping stories taught me about love and romance. Reading was the only way I could make sense of the hormones coursing through my body.”
The 39-year-old also got lost in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.
Thandie indentified with the central character Maggie Tulliver and felt that she and the doomed heroine had a lot in common.
“I was in my teens when I read this and disappeared from my life and into the book,” she explained. “The protagonist, Maggie Tulliver, is defined by rebellious, desperate frustration. As a teenager, starting to understand my own identity, this book became my bible. As a mixed-race kid, I understood Maggie’s frustrations, feeling I had to fit into a certain mould to be accepted.”
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