During the course of the seven years I played scenes with an oil slick, I played a scene with a grain of rice. Sometimes with indescribable creatures. I remember having a conversation with something which was simply a smell, that's all. It was part of our job.

But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.

There's no such thing as "just a domestic".

I've been a witness to unfairness in society all my life. To the conditions under which my mother worked all her life, working in an industrial weaving shed in the north of England. And it has been this feature of unfairness that has motivated me in all of my political thinking.

I think I came back from America a funnier and nicer person than I went.

Encouraging people to believe in it was the most important thing of all. It's one of the reasons I was always uncomfortable whenever film crews came on the set to shoot things. I didn't want our make-believe to be exposed.

I've met actors where you think, if only you could just clean up your act and get it together, people would want to work with you. Some people are so difficult, it's just not worth working with them.