While most Hollywood marriages crumble and fall, Courtney B. Vance and Angela Basset are still going strong. The two recently published a book called Friends: A Love Story which chronicles their life together and give insight into surviving a marriage under the spotlight. We recently talked to Vance to try to find out the happy couple's secret.

Where are you originally from and where do you call home now?
I'm originally from Detroit, Michigan and Los Angeles is my home now.

You graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor of Arts degree and you received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale School of Drama. What made you decide on such prestigious schools and what were your experiences like there?
For undergrad, I didn't know what I wanted to do. But I knew I wanted to go to Harvard. My uncle went there. When I got there, I thought I'd figure out what I wanted to do. Of course, when I got there, I found out that everybody seemed to already know what they wanted to do, so I felt out of the loop and a little silly.

But I continued to look, to try to find my way and discovered theatre my second year there. I started doing theatre in college and found my calling. I became very focused in drama school and my work-study job. My life was all about my theatre and my studies and seeing my girlfriend. I was going nonstop from sun up to well beyond sun down. I didn't start out planning to do theatre, I knew zilch about it. So when I actually discovered it, I threw myself into it with both hands.

Then, I did several plays at Harvard. But I found it very "cliquey," so I started to go into Boston to audition for things and to look for workshops. I ended up at the Boston Shakespeare Company, becoming a company member my last few years at Harvard. All while doing my work-study job, which was delivering the Harvard Crimson, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Harvard Yard. So I was a very busy camper between my job and my studies and being a full-time company member at the Boston Shakespeare Company. It was thrilling.

From there I took a year off and worked as a security guard, the midnight shift at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and prepared my pieces for drama school. I walked the gallery doing my two monologues for about nine months. Then, I applied to drama school, got in and that's where I met Angela. She was just finishing up there.

Once you decided to pursue acting full-time did you find steady work or did you have a tough time landing roles?
The main thing for me is that I ended up there at the absolute perfect time for me. I was cast in my second year there in Fences. We did it at Yale, and then we thought it was done. In my third year, we took it to Chicago. Then, I graduated and the show ended.

Over the summer, my girlfriend at the time and I, we had no money and we barely got an apartment. It was very, very tight. That summer, I got my first film, Hamburger Hill. Then, I found out Fences was going to become pre-Broadway. When I came back from doing the movie, we went into rehearsals and took the play to San Francisco. After that, it was coming right on to Broadway.

I had a movie opening and a play on Broadway at the same time. That was very, very thrilling. Fences launched my theatrical and my cinematic careers because everybody came to see the play. I was blessed because I had a career "ready made" for me.

You've appeared in The Preacher's Wife and Space Cowboys. Tell us about your experiences working on those two big-name projects.
The Preacher's Wife was a film that took me three or four auditions to land. I really, really wanted to do it. It was a wonderful piece, shot in New York, and took about four or five months to shoot. Penny Mashall is an amazingly wonderful director and we really connected. I had a great time, with a great cast. Winter was very, very cold there and we had a huge snowstorm hold up our shooting. At the last moment, just as we went to Maine to shoot an ice skating scene, the temperature rose to about 60 degrees and melted most of the ice.

That was one of the funny things – it wasn't funny at the time because I really wanted to ice skate because nobody could ice skate in the cast except for me. I was really looking forward to ice skating, then I got up there and I couldn't. But anyway, we faked it and it worked.

Then, Space Cowboys – Clint Eastwood is an icon. He's just an amazing director and everybody waits for him to do his next project because he's the kind of director that's in there at six in the morning and he's out of there at six in the evening because he's hoping on his helicopter to see his family. He's a family man. And everyone loves to work for him and with him.

It was quiet on the set. Nobody yells. There's no cut, there's no action. He just starts and when he thinks he's got it, he asks if it's good for everybody. He takes two takes, at most three, and then he's done. We'd rehearse the heck out of things and we move on. He basically showed me – the way most people shoot films these days is they rehearse on film, but it doesn't have to be. He cut his teeth on the spaghetti westerns. They didn't have a lot of money, so you rehearsed a lot and when you were done rehearsing; you shot it – maybe once. And, the studios love him because he comes in on time under budget. It was a great time.

You are probably best known for your work on Law and Order: Criminal Intent. How did you land the role of District Attorney Ron Carver and what was it like working on that show?
I had done a couple of episodes years prior of Law and Order for Dick Wolf and he gave me a call and wanted to know if I wanted to do something where I would go back and forth, LA to New York. I said I'd love the opportunity to do that. Great cast, great crew. Did it for five years before I felt it was time to move on. I've got a set of twins and the flying back and forth to shoot in New York was too difficult with our twins.

I had a great time. I learned what shooting a one-hour show is like, how much work it is. It's like shooting a film every eight days. You really have to love the people that you are working with – cast and crew. One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch. Sitcoms are different, you don't shoot everyday; you shoot one day out of the week.