Washington: Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o got emotional while giving a speech and called her mother her best supporter.
"My mommy is here. My number one cheerleader," Nyong'o recently told the crowd at the Massachusetts Conference for Women in Boston, where she gave one of the keynote speeches, reports people.com.
The Kenyan-American actress, who won Oscar for "12 Years a Slave", got emotional during her speech and started to cry while discussing her childhood dreams of becoming an actress.
"What I wanted more than anything was to make believe for a living," she said.
"When I watched 'The Color Purple' and watched Oprah and Whoopi Goldberg, a seed was planted in my heart to becoming an actor, but I dared not water it in public," she added.
Despite her desire to take the stage, acting wasn't a "viable career path" for a young woman growing up in Nairobi, Kenya, in the 1980s.
"Nobody I knew around me was acting for a living. In school, it wasn't one of the professions you learned about," said Nyong'o.
"It didn't help that we only had one TV station and it aired very boring programming as a child."
