If you’re an alcoholic or a drug addict, we flirt with death. We pull ourselves to the brink of destruction and if we’re lucky we pull ourselves back. We all have that in us.

I'm composing and writing music.

I just wanted to be a composer; I became an actor by default, really. I got a scholarship to a college of music and drama, hoping to take a scholarship in music. But I ended up as an acting student, so I've stuck with that for the last 50-odd years.

I'm just an actor. It's the way the script is written, and it's easy. I don't have think about it. When you receive the script, you know pretty well how to play it, apart from little technicalities like the accent.

I've always liked American actors particularly. Because that was my first impression. I was very enamoured of America when I was a kid because we were surrounded by American soldiers during the war, the accent was very strange to me, it was very exotic and very captivating.

People ask, 'Should I call you Sir Hopkins?' But I say, 'No. Call me Tony,' because it's too much of a lift-up.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.