Most of the soap operas always use the Christmas special to kill huge quantities of their characters. So they have trams coming off their rails, or cars slamming into each other or burning buildings. It's a general clean-out.

You see, in America, it's quite standard for an actor to sign, at the beginning of a series, for five or seven years. The maximum any British agent will allow you to have over an actor is three years.

If you're in the movie or in television, your failures are very public, and so are your successes. You weigh them up against each other, really.

We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.

Sometimes it is quite surprising, the emotional intensity of it. I was in NY one day, in Barnes and Noble, and I could see this woman following me around and after a bit I stopped and said 'Hello' and she just looked at me and said: “PLEASE LET EDITH BE HAPPY!”

I think American television changed world television in its reinvention of the series.

It's the gloomy things that need our help, if everything in the garden is sunny, why meddle?