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Many Americans have a pre-formed opinion of Hillary Clinton, who is expected to announce her candidacy for president this weekend. Call it a blessing — or causality — of being in the public eye for so long. But Clinton has long implied that the public perception of her is all wrong.

"Well, as someone close to me once said, 'I'm probably the most famous person you don't really know,' " Clinton told NBC in 2007.

Eight years later, Clinton could probably make the same argument. So, here are five things about the frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic nomination that you may not know or just may not remember.

1. She Started Out A Republican.

In high school, Hillary Rodham — who grew up in Illinois and was influenced by her die-hard Republican father and high school history teacher — considered herself a Republican and even became a Goldwater Girl. She wrote about it in her book Living History:

Hillary Clinton in a photo of student council leaders from her high school yearbook. Maine Township High School hide caption

itoggle caption Maine Township High School

I was also an active Young Republican and, later a Goldwater girl right down to my cowgirl outfit and straw cowboy hat emblazoned with the slogan "AuH2O."

My ninth-grade history teacher, Paul Carlson, was, and still is, a dedicated educator and a very conservative Republican. Mr. Carlson encouraged me to read Senator Barry Goldwater's recently published book, The Conscience of a Conservative. That inspired me to write my term paper on the American conservative movement, which I dedicated "To my parents, who have always taught me to be an individual." I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide.

She also writes about volunteering to check voter registration lists against addresses to find voter fraud. And during her first year of college, she was even elected president of the Wellesley Young Republicans Club. According to Carl Bernstein's book A Woman In Charge, by the fall of 1966, she identified herself as a Rockefeller Republican. By the spring of 1968, though, she was volunteering for Democrat Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign.

In 1992, while visiting her old high school in an affluent suburb of Chicago, she joked about her political evolution.

"I know I should answer the question that is on very many of your minds and that is: How did a nice Republican girl from Park Ridge go wrong?" she said to laughs.

2. In 1969, She Became The First Student (Ever) To Deliver A Commencement Address At Wellesley College.

The women's college didn't have a tradition of student commencement speakers. But, by the time the class of 1969 was nearing graduation, an activist-minded student body demanded to have a student speaker to represent them at the ceremony. In Living History, Clinton writes about going to Wellesley College President Ruth M. Adams to discuss it:

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Hillary Clinton in June 1969 at the Rodham family home. She was featured in a Life magazine story called "The Class of '69." Lee Balterman/The LIFE Premium Collection/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Lee Balterman/The LIFE Premium Collection/Getty Images

Hillary Clinton in June 1969 at the Rodham family home. She was featured in a Life magazine story called "The Class of '69."

Lee Balterman/The LIFE Premium Collection/Getty Images

When I asked her, "What is the real objection?" she said, "It's never been done." I said, "Well, we could give it a try." She said, "We don't know whom they are going to ask to speak." I said, "Well, they asked me to speak." She said, "I'll think about it." President Adams finally approved.

My friends' enthusiasm about my speaking worried me because I didn't have a clue about what I could say that could fit our tumultuous four years at Wellesley and be a proper send-off into our unknown futures.

In her introduction, Adams said, "There was no debate so far as I could ascertain as to who their spokesman was to be: Miss Hillary Rodham. Member of this graduating class, she is a major in political science and a candidate for the degree with honors."

Rodham was immediately preceded by Republican Sen. Edward W. Brooke from Massachusetts, and when she came to the microphone, she scrapped some of her prepared speech to respond to him, and said:

We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said. This has to be brief because I do have a little speech to give.

Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. What does it mean to hear that 13.3 percent of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they're just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective.

Her speech was reprinted in Life magazine and, for a time, Rodham became something of a voice of her generation.

Hillary Clinton holds the steering wheel for the Indy race car of Sarah Fisher in 2008. Clinton says she hasn't gotten behind the wheel herself since 1996. Joe Raedle/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Joe Raedle/Getty Images

3. She Hasn't Driven A Car In Almost 20 Years.

Consider it a casualty of life in a Secret Service-protected bubble. President Obama has complained about it, as did President George W. Bush. Clinton told the National Automobile Dealers Association last year, "The last time I actually drove a car myself was 1996."

It's a reminder that Clinton has been living a very public life, in a closed-off way, for a very long time. No past presidential candidate has quite this sort of life experience. For Clinton's critics, this is just one of many signs (along with her comments about being "dead broke" when the Clintons left the White House) that she can't relate to regular voters. For Clinton's campaign, figuring out how to keep "the bubble" from getting in the way of meaningful interactions and normal experiences with voters presents a challenge.

4. Her Commitment To Women And Girls Goes Way Back.

Talking about so-called women's issues may be trendy these days, but Clinton has been working on these issues essentially her whole life. Some of this passion may have been driven by her own mother's difficult childhood.

When Clinton was in high school, she volunteered with her church youth group to babysit the children of migrant laborers. From there, her resume continues with one item after another aimed at improving the lives of women and children.

Here's an excerpt from her biography from the National First Ladies' Library and Historic Site:

During her second year in law school, Hillary Clinton volunteered at Yale's Child Study Center, learning about new research on early childhood brain development, as well as New Haven Hospital, where she took on cases of child abuse and the city Legal Services, providing free legal service to the poor. Upon graduation from law school, she served as staff attorney for the Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In Arkansas, she co-founded the group Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. And all of this was before she became first lady and secretary of state, both platforms she used to advance women's empowerment and the well-being of children worldwide.

In Living History, Clinton explained how her mother had been abandoned by her grandmother, writing, "I'm still amazed at how my mother emerged from her lonely early life as such an affectionate and level headed woman."

5. She Has Been Dogged By Controversies And Scandals.

OK. You probably know this one already, but Clinton seems to have spent her entire public life fighting scandals.

From her "baking cookies" comment...

"I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession," she said in 1992.

...to Whitewater, Travel-gate and conspiracies about Vince Foster's suicide.

In the 1994 press conference below, she was asked about a number of the controversies swirling around her at the time. It is somewhat remarkable to watch the breadth of reporter questions, which went on for an hour and could have lasted longer.

Then there's Benghazi, and currently, "Server-gate." Clinton once blamed her (and her husband's) "scandal problem" on a "vast right wing conspiracy." No matter the cause, she has to be prepared for a campaign and possible presidency with more "gates" and "ghazis," because it has been that way for the past 25 years.

2016 Presidential Race

Democrats

Hillary Clinton

"The play is an object," Val (Kristen Stewart) tells actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) in Clouds of Sils Maria while helping her rehearse for a role. "It changes depending how you look at it." One of the many impressive elements of Olivier Assayas' rich, remarkably intelligent film is how it explores every angle of its own story. It won't ever be mistaken for Inception, but Clouds is also a puzzle film, even if that's not evident on the surface. Its plot is relatively straightforward (though not entirely devoid of mystery); you won't need to guess and debate about what happened when and why. But it's nevertheless a work of many moving parts, one to take apart and put back together again repeatedly.

The bulk of the film is devoted to the relationship between Maria and Val, who is Maria's assistant. We meet them just as Maria, a renowned actress who has worked in the theatre as well as in films both prestigious and blockbuster, is on her way to accept a prize in Zurich on behalf of director Wilhelm Melchior. When Maria was a teenager, Melchior made her famous by casting her in Maloja Snake, a play about a young woman who seduces her older boss and drives her to suicide.

Wilhelm dies before the ceremony, however, and the suddenly somber, reflective affair prompts Maria to accept the elder role in a new production of Maloja Snake opposite Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz, delightful and cunning in equal measure), an actress known more for her rehab stints and constant tabloid presence than her performances.

From there, Clouds retreats to Wilhelm's now-empty home in Sils Maria, a town nested in the Swiss Alps, where Maria and Val hole up to rehearse. The play within the play explicitly mirrors Maria and Val's relationship in only one of the movie's overtly literal analogies. At other points, the parallels extend beyond the screen into real life, as when Val — played by the star of the oft-mocked Twilight movies — urges Maria to take Jo-Ann seriously as an actress despite the fact that she appears only in seemingly mindless blockbusters.

Assayas, who also wrote Clouds, is interested in such superficialities as initial points of contrast. The play and the real-life comparisons offer an apparent sense of order—a world split into simple contrasts of old and young, high and low culture—that the movie then breaks through. To start, Maria appears as a paragon of classic elegance—her suspicions of the Internet and modern technology reflect her age, but her dress and demeanor at Wilhelm's ceremony suggest a timeless grace and sophistication. It's Val who seems harried and out of control.

That hard opposition begins to crumble when Val leaves Maria alone at the ceremony, at which point her self-assurance diminishes without Val's support. It fades entirely once the two move to Sils Maria.

As powerful as Binoche's performance is, Stewart surpasses her. She best embodies the antitheses of her character, her quiet apathy concealing a turmoil of envy, desire, respect and simmering contempt. Val is also arguably the more difficult role; she's given less opportunity to wield control but required to nonetheless display power. Whereas Binoche expertly manages to display Maria's ever-shifting but rarely concealed emotions without seeming maudlin, Stewart has relatively few chances to offer a similarly direct view of Val's feelings ("I never know if I should believe what little you do tell me," Maria says to Val at one point). On the few occasions Val opens up, she almost immediately retreats back into what seems to be a more submissive role.

The power dynamics here resemble those in All About Eve or Black Swan, with the important difference that Assayas isn't concerned with a protg supplanting her master. In fact, the only wholly unsympathetic character in the movie is an actor who tells Maria that Maloja Snake "tells a simple story" about two completely contrasting women, the younger of whom "squeezes everything she can out of" her older mistress, who is in turn "fascinated by her own downfall." Reality can appear that clear-cut on the surface, but what Clouds reveals with time is a more complicated and seemingly endless series of transmutations.

Assayas may indulge in overt declarations of his themes, but there's no certainty to his approach. He softly and persistently disturbs the ground beneath our feet, never content with a position unless he has considered its opposite. That method pervades every aspect of the movie: Jo-Ann's rowdy public image is in contrast to her quiet behavior in person, with a hint of manipulation in both; Maria's disdain toward younger artists who have a natural knack for PR proves hypocritical, given the deliberately chosen "classy" image that Val helps craft for her.

The movement between opposites is heightened and perfected, though, in Maria and Val's relationship. After disagreeing over a reading of Maloja Snake, Maria tells Val that she can't ever understand a character without embodying her: "Thinking about a play is different than living it." But the reality seems to be the reverse. Maria is all interpretation and thought, while Val is the one who acts throughout, both for herself and for Maria. The shifts in power between them, and later between Maria and Jo-Ann, depend on which quality — consideration or action, aged wisdom or youthful exuberance — matters more. To its final shot, the movie offers no conclusion as to who comes out on top.

It's a quality of great art that it can hold competing ideas aloft and give them equal weight; it's the magic of the best art that it can satisfy while leaving the conflict unresolved. Clouds is outstanding in its individual components—its script, performances, cinematography, and pacing—but more importantly, it's that magical kind of work: a complete, perfectly crafted, fixed object that, upon reflection, remains in perpetual motion.

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Mary Beth Heffernan shows Dr. Jerry Brown his image on the back of a camera. Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College

Mary Beth Heffernan shows Dr. Jerry Brown his image on the back of a camera.

Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College

How often does this happen: You're listening to a news story describing some problem halfway around the world and you say to yourself, "I know how to fix that!" It's not your area of expertise. It's not a place you know. But you are sure that if you went there you could solve the problem.

Los Angeles artist Mary Beth Heffernan is the rare person who decided to actually give it a try. Last summer, Heffernan, who is also an art professor at Occidental College, became obsessed with Ebola — particularly the images of the health care workers in those protective suits, or PPE as they're called for short.

"They looked completely menacing," says Heffernan. "I mean they really made people look almost like storm troopers. I imagined what would it be like to be a patient? To not see a person's face for days on end?"

And what really got Heffernan is that as far as she could tell, there was an easy fix.

"I found myself almost saying out loud, 'Why don't they put photos on the outside of the PPE? Why don't they just put photos on?!'"

Here was her idea: Snap a photo of the health worker with a big smile on their face. Hook up the camera to a portable printer and print out a stack of copies on large stickers. Then every time the worker puts on a set of PPE they can slap one of their pictures on their chest, and their patients can get a sense of the warm, friendly human underneath the suit.

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"It's not a sophisticated response," she says. "It's almost stupidly simple."

Anyone could do this, she thought. And then she thought, I should do this.

The timing was good. She had a sabbatical coming up and a $5,000 grant to work on an art project. She decided to use the money to get her photo kits to West Africa. This would be her art project.

I had to ask Heffernan: How is this art?

She explains: "This is in the spirit of social sculpture. This is part of that history of making art that's about action, about changing society."

Soon Heffernan's kitchen table was piled high with printers to test and applications for more funding. But her biggest challenge was connecting to the people who run Ebola treatment centers.

She reached out to 75 people. And in mid-January, one of her emails reached a key official in Liberia: Dr. Moses Massaquoi, the Ebola case manager for the country.

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Mary Beth Heffernan photographs health care worker Martha Lyne Freeman. Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College

Mary Beth Heffernan photographs health care worker Martha Lyne Freeman.

Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College

Massaquoi says Heffernan wasn't the first person to write him pitching some untested scheme. In fact, it was getting to be kind of a pain.

"We've had tons of emails!" he says. "And I was like, 'Can you just stop writing me emails?'"

But Massaquoi says Heffernan's proposal stood out. He'd worked in Ebola wards and the photos made so much sense. He wrote back immediately.

Within a month Heffernan and a colleague were on a plane to Liberia's capital, lugging 12 enormous boxes of supplies.

"Some guy that was on our flight actually looked at me and said, 'Are you moving here?!'" she recalls, laughing.

Right away they ran into snags. It was like a crash course in what can go wrong when people in one country try to dream up solutions for people in another.

For instance, the electrical adapters that Heffernan had planned on using weren't the right kind. Three printers blew up.

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Mary Beth Heffernan prints photos at the Ebola treatment unit. Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College

Mary Beth Heffernan prints photos at the Ebola treatment unit.

Courtesy of Marc Campos/Occidental College

At the first Ebola treatment center she worked with, the staff liked the photo stickers so much they kept walking off with them. "Some brought them home and put them on their refrigerator and their child's backpack. There was another who put the labels all over his car."

It turned out that the staff had been doing really dangerous, really grueling work for months — at times without getting paid. And photos aren't easy to come by in Liberia. So sticker pictures seemed like a rare perk.

Heffernan realized that in the future, she should bring regular photo paper along with the stickers, so everyone can be given a proper photo take home.

For all the hiccups, ultimately the project did start working. Jennifer Giovanni is head of infection control at a treatment center in a rural part of Liberia. She says the photos have made a huge difference — and not only for the patients.

"I feel like I'm working now with other human beings instead of, I almost want to say, like white monsters or white zombies or something."

As for Heffernan, she's back in Los Angeles — and working on bringing more photo kits to Sierra Leone.

PPE

ebola

Liberia

A year after Sept. 11, actor Adam Driver joined the Marine Corps. He was working odd jobs, selling vacuum cleaners and paying rent to live in his parents' house — and he says, like many other Americans, he felt a sense of patriotism and he wanted retribution.

"I wanted to 'test my manhood' and serve my country and just get even and ... get away from home and everything I didn't like about it," Driver tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "In retrospect, it was actually pretty great."

After suffering from a mountain biking injury, Driver, who now stars in the film comedy While We're Young, had to go on limited duty and decided to pursue acting. Now that his movie career is taking off, Driver says he sees similarities between the military and acting: Each person is part of a group trying to accomplish a mission that's greater than themselves.

"The discipline, the self-maintenance, the comradery — they're so similar," Driver says. "I don't view acting as such a radical departure from the military."

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Driver is best known for his role as Hannah's boyfriend on the HBO series Girls. Craig Blankenhorn/Courtesy of HBO hide caption

itoggle caption Craig Blankenhorn/Courtesy of HBO

Driver is best known for his role as Hannah's boyfriend on the HBO series Girls.

Craig Blankenhorn/Courtesy of HBO

Driver has significant roles in the next Star Wars film and Martin Scorsese's forthcoming film Silence. In While We're Young, he plays one half of a young couple that befriends a middle-aged husband and wife, played by Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts.

Driver says that whenever he acts, he's hard on himself. "I have a tendency to ... drive myself and the other people around me crazy with the things I want to change. Everything in me wants to try to make it better and I feel like it's just not a healthy thing."

But he's learning to "surrender as much control as possible."

"I don't think of it as a done, set thing that people watch and may have their opinions about," he says. "I let it be what it is and then try to move on in my mind as soon as possible."

Interview Highlights

On relating more to Stiller's character, a failed documentary filmmaker, than his own character in While We're Young

In a lot of ways I don't really feel ... as connected to my generation or the interconnectedness of my generation, and I feel like there's need for discipline and not having a right answer and not having immediate access to everything. I mean, I'm a total hypocrite because it's not like I don't log onto the Internet or see what's great about social media.

I'm not involved in social media, but for me it just doesn't work. But I just thought there's something honorable [about] a guy [Stiller's character] alone in a room ramming his head against a wall trying to figure out [his artistic] process and being tormented by it and working on it for such a long time.

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On why he doesn't do social media

Maybe it's because I have big thumbs that it's literally hard for me to type things on a phone or a computer. If I had smaller thumbs maybe I would have a different opinion about social media. ... It just takes me a long time to figure out buttons.

On getting cast as Adam on Girls

I was the first person to audition, actually. ... I was doing a play at the time and thought TV was evil and not where I wanted to be or do — I wanted to do theater. But it was HBO and I had done some things with HBO before and I thought that they were different and the storytelling is always so good. My agent convinced me to go in because I was having a real high-horse moment and that's when I met [Girls creator Lena Dunham] and that was kind of it.

On the sex scenes in Girls

I felt pretty good with it, not in a weird — what's the word when people like to get naked — ... exhibitionist way, but more for the story. What Lena was really going after didn't seem exploitative. ... It was very much in line with those characters; it wasn't just graphic sex for the sake of it or just for the sake of being controversial.

On not being deployed to Iraq with his platoon because of a broken sternum from a mountain biking accident

Not going because you did something to yourself and hurt yourself was pretty embarrassing and terrible. I tried to go; I kept loading up on drugs and trying to run and they put me back in my unit and it was fine and then ... [I wore] a 90-pound pack and my chest started to separate so I had to go back on limited duty. ... So I kind of screwed myself in the long run because I wanted to go so much. You're trained to do this job for two years with these people, the idea of not going, someone else going in your place or not being there is not really an easy thing to sit with.

On top of that, getting out and going to acting school and meeting up with those guys later and they're like, "What have you been doing?" I had been like wearing pajamas and pretending to give birth to myself in an acting class. Trying to face up to that is pretty devastating.

"I had really strong judgments about civilians — thought of them as nasty civilians who are just wasting time and not disciplined. And it took me a while to get over that and not be so judgmental."

- Adam Driver, actor

On going from Marine to Juilliard student

[The other students'] ideas of [me], like, "Oh, you're a Marine so obviously you're going to hit somebody at some point and drag [your] knuckles around or something." ... I could feel their apprehension and being scared, and I guess I was apprehensive and scared, too, in a different way.

I had really strong judgments about civilians — thought of them as nasty civilians who are just wasting time and not disciplined. And it took me a while to get over that and not be so judgmental, or calm down. It's a weird thing to turn off when suddenly you're getting into this crazy civilian world where people are wearing their hats indoors and their clothes untucked and [they] wander in a room looking nasty and cleaning crud out of their eyes. I was ready to act and throw all my effort into it.

On how acting and the military are similar

You have a group of people trying to accomplish a mission that's greater than themselves — it's not about one person. ... Everyone has their specific role and you have to know what your role is and when to show up and be there and when to back away. Then you have usually someone leading it, a platoon leader or a director, and sometimes they know what they're doing and sometimes they really don't know what they're doing, and that's frustrating. Obviously the stakes are completely different.

On his appearance

I did look strange as a teenager — very prominent facial features, a big nose, big ears and tiny eyes, very rat-like. ... I had to develop thick skin. God, in the Marine Corps, if you're insecure about anything or you have ... a mole out of place, people will find it, especially in boot camp, and drill it until you're numb to it, I guess in a way. I was lucky, though, because in my platoon there was another guy who also had big ears and the drill instructors noticed him before they did me, so he was Ears No. 1 and I was Ears No. 2.