By the time I came of age and, indeed, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, I had seen the entire William Shakespeare canon, which, in those days, you were quite able to do. Now, it's a much harder thing. Mrs. Thatcher was really axing public subsidy for the arts.

At the assassination of Caesar when Cassius says, "How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown!" And you kind of went, "Never was there a truer word spoken."

I was doing an interview with Charlie Rose and he said, "What do you think about Margaret Thatcher?" - and I had not heard she had died at this point - and he said, "Is there any kind of Shakespearian overtone here?" I said, "Well, actually, Julius Caesar, because ever if a politician was stabbed in the back, it was Mrs. Thatcher, by all her conspiratorial cabinet, which really did just stab her in the back." It's a rather interesting resonance.

King Lear by William Shakespeare frightens me. I've never done King Lear, I guess partially because my father dwindled into dementia in his last years and King Lear is such an accurate portrayal of a father figure suffering from dementia - the play was almost intolerable for me.

Sometimes it can get overburdened with nuance - the actors find all sorts of different spins on the lines that can lose simplicity and directness. They all become fond of their extra stresses and the audience are going, "Just give me the line simply, what did you mean?" You have to ward against that.

I have seen productions of Julius Caesar that set it in a modern, Western context and it just looks as though they're getting rid of a particularly cantankerous chairman of the board rather than the great leader of the world.

I went to a Jesuit school and they did a William Shakespeare play every year. I got to know Shakespeare as parts I wanted to play. I missed out on playing Ophelia - it was an all-boys school. The younger boys used to play the girls, I played Lady Anne in Richard III and Lady Macbeth, then Richard II and Malvolio. I just became a complete Shakespeare nut, really.