I find what I call the [bleep] side of the industry very difficult. You won't see me at other peoples' premiers. I mean, I go to my own premiers because I have to help my film, but I don't enjoy that whole side of it. I don't enjoy celebrityhood. I love getting a seat in a restaurant. I love it when people say hi when I don't know them. I mean, that's fine, but apart from that, I like the elements of celebrityhood which make living in the world like living in your own village.

The work I prefer to do are the smaller budget pictures, television can be great but it ties you up for quite a long time.

To be an actor you need various things. You need to have a head for choosing the roles. You have to be, hopefully, easy to work with so people enjoy working with you. You have to deal with missing roles, with not being asked to work, with doing good work and then being castigated by the critics for it. You have to have a skin that can deal with all of that. I, fortunately, seem to have the makeup which allows me to deal with the business. I mean, not as everybody.

Mine is an actor's voice, not a singer's voice, but the part was written for an actor (Richard Burton), not a singer.

I was educated in a private school in England amongst people who had been trained for sort of banking or the Army or business. As I came towards the end of my education, I thought I must find something or I'll never meet any of these people again.

You have to communicate on a much greater scale. With a camera, you can use the flick of an eye. On stage, a lot of other things are happening that can pull focus or energy. You're always thinking the same way, but you have to amplify your thoughts with the volume of your speech and the ways you use your whole body to communicate what you're feeling. It's a little bit different from film.

I think nobody since has written such extraordinary work as Shakespeare writes. The characters he writes are full of inconsistencies, which is a great human quality - I mean we're all very inconsistent in the way we behave.