If you don't want women to do whatever they need to do then you must provide them with food, you must provide them with shelter and their basic human rights.

The best way [to survive] the red carpet is by wearing Ugg boots. But unfortunately, I have not yet managed to persuade the people who style me at these times to let me do that.

There is a painful difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event and its final certainty.

Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.

It’s about time a 55-year-old British woman is the heroine of an action movie. I may have to write it.

I have a nervous breakdown in the film and in one scene I get to stand at the top of the stairs waving an empty sherry bottle which is, of course, a typical scene from my daily life, so isn't much of a stretch.

I was brought up by very witty people who were dealing with quite difficult things: disease and death... I was brought up by people who tended to giggle at funerals.