A doctor can be a doctor today and they will be a doctor tomorrow. But an actor, well you're not working at anything right now, whereas the doctor is going to have their job tomorrow, for the most part. So there's the insecurity of that, and you have to go where the work is.

For me, I am constantly forcing myself to evolve, because, I think, to stagnate creatively - there's a certain death that happens with that. Because if you're not moving forward and you're not evolving, you're devolving, and I don't want to go backwards. I want to be better at what I do tomorrow than I am today. I don't want to be worse.

Pedigree matters: if you break your shoulder trying to open a door, it's much harder to play the game once you get in the room.

I played Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music and everybody's like, "Well she wouldn't have been this and that, she shouldn't be playing it." Well I'm going to do it and I did it. I've been warned my entire life and I've persisted and that's what I hope my children will do as well.

...and if you hear something you know, please sing along. No wait - I take that back - you can't sing along - this is about me now - this is my show.

I think for a lot of people that are in performing arts, it's easy to fall into the trap of starting to confuse what's real life and what's not, because to your body it's all real.

In the performing arts you have to have thick, thick, thick skin, because of all the rejection you face on a daily basis, and the fact that work never lasts for very long. But you need thin, thin, thin skin in order to access all of your emotions and your creativity so that you can express it. You can't be dead inside. Otherwise you've got nothing to give. So it's a paradox, that we have to exist in both planes in order to do what we do.