I watch an awful lot of old Hollywood movies - Ill devour anything with Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. My absolute favourite is Sunset Boulevard starring Gloria Swanson.

If you build a career on being a beautiful young woman, that's going to be a short career. I have to establish I can act. I don't want to have to visit the plastic surgeon every two years.

I read, go for walks and I love to garden. My hands are such a mess. People think I should have movie star hands, but they're just gardening ones. Always slightly grubby and with a bit of dirt under the fingernails.

Your roots, your family, your friends all become so much more important to you as you get older, especially if you are a wandering minstrel like me.

I don't like posh hotels. I like small, eclectic hotels, and luxury for me would mean really good company with good food in a really funky, beautiful house in the middle of a field where someone came and serviced the place for us.

Its either feast or famine, and thats the way its been for as long as I can remember. Ive spent my whole career thinking Ill never work again. Every actor lives with that insecurity. You just have to negotiate the rapids as they come.

My preferred environment is by the sea or somewhere rural. I don't want to be in a city, I don't want to visit New York and I don't want to go shopping.