I don't think films about elderly people have been made very much. I think of Cocoon and Driving Miss Daisy. But they always seem to be fairly successful, so it's a bit baffling as to why everybody has to be treated as if they were five-years-old.

People think of you differently if you've been in their homes. They think they own you because they watched you while they were eating dinner, or they can turn you up or down, or even freeze you.

We can't escape the shadow, so the best thing we can do is notice the light and be open to it.

Listen, I must be 110 by now. Granny is going to kick the bucket at some point.

Little girls, I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.

The drama school was in Oxford - and it's funny to think of it, but in those days when I started out the University was nearly all male. And they certainly weren't mixed.

The chemotherapy was very peculiar, something that makes you feel much worse than the cancer itself, a very nasty thing. I used to go to treatment on my own, and nearly everybody else was with somebody. I wouldn't have liked that. Why would you want to make anybody sit in those places?