Women are always self-effacing and self-denying. There's a term that enrages me, and I always used to swear that I'd never play characters described that way. The term is "long-suffering."

The important thing is to bring people with Parkinson's into our world and for the public to have a real understanding of it, as they've beginning to have with autism.

A woman with knowledge is something that frightens the status quo quite a lot.

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've not won different awards - many, many times - so luckily I've practiced that whenever you are nominated for anything, you enter into this marvelous, fantabulous bubble called the bubble of nomination. The minute the envelope is opened and your name isn't called out, the bubble bursts. And no one calls you up the next day to say, 'So sorry you didn't win,' or 'You looked gorgeous - nothing. If you win, you get about another 24 hours in that lovely bubble and then - pop - you are slightly wet all over from the bubble and realize that you have to get on with real life.

You know, some actors, all of their potential is in their youth, and when that passes, their qualities of as an actor pass. But he - Alan [Rickman] was the opposite, and their are other actors who are like that, who, really, their potential is in maturity.

Nothing is quite so emotional and passionate as what goes on inside of a family. People are driven to distraction by a father or a mother or a husband. Or a child.