I'm always conscious of the fact that I am part of a profession that is 80% permanently unemployed. So, to be working in any sense is to be privileged.

I'd gone into that restaurant and sat down and the waitress had taken my order and everybody else had seen me with this what must have looked like this creature, this animal, sitting on the top of my head!

I had to think long and hard about what it would imply, what it would mean. Would it mean any alterations of one's lifestyle? Or, more than that, the way that people regarded you? The way they reacted to you if you had a Sir in front of your name?

I'm always conscious of the fact that I am part of a profession that is 80% permanently unemployed. So, to be working in any sense is to be privileged.

I think my parents were happy that I'd gone to university and gotten a degree in history so they thought, 'Well if acting doesn't work for him, he can always become a history teacher or something.' Fortunately, the acting worked out.

Sir Larry could be very strict and a disciplinarian, too. He had many faces; he wore many hats. But, ultimately, he loved the theater and he loved actors.

Real-life people are often the hardest to play, people that you recreate who have actually lived, because you have to live up to people's knowledge of those characters.