Sometimes you do feel a script that glows in your hand the moment you start reading it. By page four of Shakespeare in Love, I said, 'I have to be in this movie.

I suddenly became aware over the last couple of years that I'm in my sixties. I never thought about it. I thought I'd better start acting my age or find roles that are going to be interesting to me in the sexagenarian repertoire, because it's not what you do in your forties or fifties.

More people have a fear of speaking than a fear of death. So at a funeral, most people would want to be the person in the coffin rather than the person delivering the eulogy!

If in the sex scene you happen to be naked in front of a lot of other people you've just got to put that aside, in the same way that you have to put that aside in a fully-clothed intense dialogue scene because you're entering into that particular imaginative state of play.

I did not want to put myself on the line, as an Australian playing Britains greatest comic actor. The fans of Sellers are obsessive, possessive - and aggressive. I did not want to risk their anger - or my own reputation.

They were saying, 'Keep this under your hat, but Jack Sparrow's going to die in the second movie.' I went, 'You're kidding me. The fans are going to go berserk.'

Nobody ever said that growing old would be easy. Just having to hold the newspaper out in your forties and then hair growing out of unusual parts of your body in your fifties. It's tough on the ego.