I want more children but for the next three years I want to act.

Being a mother gives you an incredible feeling of empowerment, you think if I can go through such pain and that level of sleep and still operate and not be grumpy you can do anything. It can be quite scary, you can't function your brain, forget your vocabulary.

I look at being an actress as being like a mummy: You're bandaged up and preserved as soon as you start making other people money.

Any scene that involves stripping off is hell. You just know it's going to take a day or more to get it right. It never gets any better and it's always uncomfortable, and all you can do is grin and bare it. I just pray it's never gratuitous and that it doesn't look so fake that all you hear in the audience is, 'Well, that's not really her, is it?'

The doctors say it dates back to a film where I had these huge prosthetic breasts because my character was breast-feeding. The weight of them, and of the baby, did my back in.

My whole family is quite petite, so I have good genes on my side. But I find it quite tiresome that we have to keep talking about sizes and how much weight we can lose.

Onstage, there's no hiding; you either can or can't act. There's no second take.