I'm sure people in the business have said: She's too old for that part. I don't hear about it because your agent protects you from those negative things.

Success breeds success, and failure leads to a sort of fallow period.

So many roles for women demand that you make the audience fall in love with you or sympathise with you.

I don't take money seriously, so I can't keep any.

In a play, the director is God, and I'm a great arguer. Rather boringly so, I think, about trying different things.

My parents were very volatile but very loving. My father would get jealous if my mother looked at somebody. I used to be insanely jealous. It comes out of insecurity. It can come and go, but you get to the point in life where you don't have this raging jealousy and protectiveness about your world.

Every time we moved on, I joined a different class in a different school with different girls until, aged 13, my father had taken the decision to pull me out of school altogether. Everything I needed, he reasoned, could be found within the rich language of Shakespeare's plays at which, by then, I was something of an old hand.