I feel like with acting it's not like you make a choice - it's kind of in you and you have to do it or you wouldn't be able to survive.

I always had a very strong sense of independence. I really liked being able to buy my Alanis Morissette Jagged Little Pill album. I wore that as a badge of honor. I love not having to rely on anyone.

Day to day, I always wear eyeliner on my top lid and mascara. I like to do my own makeup, it depends on the event.

I was a tomboy running around in the garden. I used to play on a local cricket team. I grew up with all boy cousins, for the most part, and my brother. My mother was in the kind of late-sixties, early-seventies origins of female emancipation. And she was very much like, "You're not going to be defined by how you look. It's going to be about who you are and what you do."

As a child, I always liked dressing up and getting into character, and actors are lucky in being able to retain that playfulness, though we do seem to find it hard to grow up.

I always had a very strong sense of independence.

I think [Charles] Dickens was an extrovert and Nelly [Ternan] an introvert, and I think that Nelly saw beyond the fame and adulation and she actually loved Dickens essentially for who he was. So I think he felt like she was someone he could be himself with.