The Ledge - Stevie Talks About Her Mom

Huffington Post [click for the video]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...=Entertainment

Life lessons begin in the home. From rock star Lenny Kravitz to veteran journalist Tom Brokaw, five famous figures share in the above video what they've learned from their mothers about life, love and success.

Kravitz, whose mother is the late actress Roxie Roker, says her warm personality and sense of fairness inspired him. "She wasn't someone who would gossip about people," he says. "And she was a very good gauge of character."

Another musician, Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks, remembers her late mother as being supportive, but strict during her childhood. Due to her own early struggles growing up poor, Nicks' mother worked hard to instill a sense of independence in her daughter. "She wanted me to not ever have to depend on anyone. She wanted me to be fearless," Nicks says.

Brokaw's mother, he says, is the one who helped him discover his passion for news. "My mother was someone who'd grown up in a bookish family. She turned me on to books and politics and what was going on in the wider world," the journalist says.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has also spent much of her life around politics. How did her mother raise such a successful child? "She will tell you that she did it by not interfering," Sotomayor says, also pointing out her mother's fierce love of education and achievement.

Dr. Maya Angelou's mother is another who believed in achievement, specifically her daughter's. Once, while walking down the street together decades ago, Angelou's mother told her that she was the greatest woman she's ever met, mentioning Angelou's name in the same breath as civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

"I was 22 years old," Angelou marvels. "I thought, 'Suppose she's right. Suppose I really am going to be somebody.'"