I threw [Picasso's] drawing on the floor and in doing so, threw away about £50m.

Ninety nine per cent of the time, for anyone who wins or makes money, it makes them happy.

I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertakers assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

My father was a coal hewer from Goldthorpe, a coal-mining village in South Yorkshire. He played for the Yorkshire second team as an opening fast bowler - to me he was a gorgeously heroic man. He helped form a union and closed down the Barnsley seam because it was seeping gas, and saved many, many lives.

You can't call it an adventure unless it's tinged with danger. The greatest danger in life, though, is not taking the adventure at all. To have the objective of a life of ease is death. I think we've all got to go after our own Everest.

When I was 11 I played the part of Rumpelstiltskin and my teacher told me I would make a great actor.

I do everything I can for wild animals because they have such a bloody awful time.