Within our culture, every school has a swimming pool. We lived on the coast. People swam in the surf. It's a very sporty nation and at that particular time anyone who had an artistic bent was very much an outsider. So if you liked reading or ideas or playing the piano then your dad viewed you as a sissy, basically.

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.

When people come and tell me I was terrific in this or that, I do not want to fall flat on my face next time. But, tough, I have fallen flat before. You just get up and dust yourself off.

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.

I wouldn't mind meeting some of the people I've attempted to portray from the olden, olden days. They probably would all have really terrible skin and horrible bad breath, and I'd have to give them an Altoid.

I went to England in the '70s, and I was in my early 20s. There was still a residue of that era of being an underclass or colonial. I assume it must have been a more aggressive and prominent attitude 40 years before that, because Australia internationally wasn't regarded as having much cultural value. We were a country full of sheep and convicts.

I think that Ionesco's greatest weapon is that he's able to make us laugh at the darkest corners of our souls.