For a long time, people assumed I was gay, so when I got married the press were all a bit shocked and made a big deal of it - and ditto when I had children. I felt very much under the microscope with paps outside the house taking pictures of me getting the baby out of the car, it was excruciating. I remember getting her out of the car seat and thinking 'oh God I'm going to drop her and they're going to take a picture'. I was so nervous. Those sorts of things are really hard.

Once you get labelled, people expect you to behave within the very narrow confines of that label.

Anybody who has had the pleasure of reading an article about themselves in the press, knows that on the whole, there is a huge amount of inaccuracy, value judgment and the use of a crowbar to insert editorial bias that reflects the current political leaning of that particular paper.

I think self-esteem is fluid. It's not a fixed state, and so some days are better than others.

I used to get nervous about three weeks before a gig... now I've managed to condense it down to a manageable ten minutes.

When I was a nurse my favourite assignment was the anorexic ward. I sometimes ate as many as seventeen dinners

With proper acting, I don't know what I would play - I got sent a script for a play, and it said in the notes that my proposed character was 'hideously fat and ugly'. That made my day. I mean, I do know I am no oil painting.