My father worked for the Foreign Office, so he was away a lot of the time. We were a very volatile family. There was a lot of love and a lot of conflict. The conflict kicked in mostly during my adolescence.

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.

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.

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.

Soaps are one of the few areas on TV that really embrace older women. In drama, there's this ridiculous invisibility for women between the ages of 40 and 60. Unless you're old enough to play a grandmother, there just aren't the roles.

I don't think atheism means one does not believe in a spiritual life. I think it means one does not follow the tenets of the established religions.

I think the joy of any soap opera is it is always there. You are allowed into this world for a little while and it's safe in that you are watching other people go through some troubles rather than yourself. It's there every night, and there is something special about that sort of terrestrial television experience for a mass audience.