I had the best teacher in the business. Kevin Costner was my teacher. I was acting opposite him and he was directing me. The way he directed me, for which I am eternally grateful, is he would watch the scene back on the monitor, which is sort of considered unfashionable - you're not meant to watch yourself. But he was like, "Come around. Watch this. See there, you're doing a great reaction, but you're doing it out of frame." That was exactly what I needed. I learned how to act on film from him.

I really needed to have something in my life, because I realized there were other things more important than my career. So I love having my children and my family.

I couldn't get any of the ingenue roles when younger because at 5 feet 9 inches with a deep voice I was always too... genue. My career has completely happened since I was 29.

That was a bizarre and unlikely event, which has misled a generation of drama students from my old drama school that dreams really do come true. I was an unemployed actor. I had been an actor for about eight years, and had worked in theater, and done a tiny bit of TV, and somehow an audition video of mine ended up on Kevin Costner's television screen, and he rang me up and invited me to fly first-class to Hollywood and be in his movie The Postman.

My skin may have wrinkles but it's because I'm smiling so much. That might sound like some terrible American greetings card, but I feel it's immoral for me to castigate my body for getting older, when it does everything I ask of it.

The trouble with audition process is, when you're an unemployed actor, it's the only time you get to act, and it can be quite fun. If you feel in control of the material and you feel that the people are pleased to see you and are excited by you auditioning for them, it can be a really rewarding process. But it can also be a very humiliating process.

I didn't know box office was a thing you could possess but I don't have it. I go up for lovely roles and people with this nebulous thing called box office get them so there isn't much I can do about that unless you know where I can get some box-office myself!