Ruby Wax
The BBC 100 Women award is the most concrete public recognition attached to Ruby Wax's name, a distinction she received in the course of a career that has moved, with unusual range, across comedy, acting, writing, journalism, psychotherapy, and lecturing.
Born on April 19, 1953, in Evanston, Wax is a United States citizen who has worked in English across stage, screen, and page. She was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and later trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Further study followed at Regent's University London and at Kellogg College. That sequence of institutions traces a career that has never settled into a single professional identity: she has worked as a comedian, a stage actor, a television writer, a screenwriter, a journalist, a psychotherapist, and a lecturer, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in succession.
The BBC 100 Women award stands as the named marker of recognition she has received. Her training at Kellogg College, taken alongside her established work as a comedian and actor, reflects the breadth that defines her professional life — a life shaped equally by performance and by formal academic engagement pursued across multiple institutions on two continents.
Quotes by Ruby Wax
Ruby Wax's insights on:
The most cognitively brilliant people usually have had to sacrifice their emotional selves.
Life is not a rerun, we don’t have stunt doubles or understudies, we’re it. The universe doesn’t happen to us, we are the universe happening. It actually matters what we do.
I never weigh myself, but the brutal truth of television is that they don’t employ old people or fat people.
The oxytocin doesn’t just induce feelings of pleasure, it stimulates empathy and compassion, which are also contagious, and so we infect each other with kindness and that is when the human race is at its finest.
We are our own walking pharmacies shooting ourselves up with our own homemade chemicals. This constant need for a fix to make you feel good prompts you to pursue rewards over and over again and strengthens the behaviour that made you want to get them in the first place. It’s a vicious circle. So.
Now we determine each other’s worth by asking, ‘What do you do?’ If you say ‘nothing’, people move away from you as if you’re a corpse.
In my opinion, our downfall began when we started to think of ourselves as ‘individuals’.