OK, I wasn't as successful as, say, Julia Roberts, but I'd spent years in a very respectable career, some big American films but a host of other smaller, really exciting, maybe experimental films, being paid rubbish but working with fine people, that was what I thought I was known for.

I think work really is a life saver, because it carries you forward, which is good.

The highest pay cheque my mother ever received funded the building of a nursery school in Shepherd's Bush - the school cost well over three times the money she donated to the making of the film 'The Palestinian.' Unsurprisingly this always goes unmentioned in the press.

The early part of my career I really struggled, getting turned down again and again. I was in debt, and it was horrible. And then my family hit such highs in their careers, I asked myself what I was thinking going into the same profession.

There's still a bit of a problem, in that so many leading English roles are taken by American or French actresses.

My mother, for the last 20 years anyway, would not call herself a Marxist but a human rights activist.

I live quite an unsettled life.