I do think it's well over-time to have a female Doctor Who. I think a gay, black female Doctor Who would be the best of all.

What you want is a comfortable environment that you feel you can invent in. Because film is such a lumbering, technical, huge, great Neanderthal thing, it's hard to create that little space of peace, and calm, and creativity, and ease. That's what you want the director to create for you, so that when you walk on the set, you forget all of that, and the fact that it's costing gazillions of dollars a second.

I resent having witnessed the survival of some very mediocre male actors and the professional demise of the very brilliant female ones.

I used to look out the window of my bedroom as a kid, and there were these stars that, in my mind, made a big "A" in the sky. I thought my destiny was to go there.

Southend is a dormitory town for London. But it also had this thing of being the playground of the East End - a glamorous holiday town.

With that incredible voice that he [Alan Rickman] could play like a sort of wonderful instrument, like a cello or something. He played his voice, and he could be the most subtle of actors. And he could also be quite a big actor. He could do the grandiose performances as well.

Writers can get very angry when an actor says, "I don't know, I don't feel very comfortable with this line." Sometimes though, you're working with a writer for whom that is simply not apt - like Harold Pinter.