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

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.

The studio have always claimed that the ship is the star of the show, especially when they're renegotiating contracts.

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.

I've often reflected on this in the past weeks as I've been following the presidential campaign: Very often, I thought it would have been great for both of these guys to sit down and be force-fed a couple of dozen episodes of Star Trek.

As a child, I heard in my home doctors and ambulance men say, 'Mrs. Stewart, you must've done something to provoke him.' 'Mrs. Stewart, it takes two to make an argument.' Wrong. Wrong! My mother did nothing to provoke that - and even if she had, violence is never ever a choice that a man should make. Ever.

If someone says 'Give me one word of advice,' I say 'be fearless.' And knowing without any shadow of a doubt that what they have to give - who they are - is totally unique and not shared by anybody else. And to believe in that uniqueness. It took me decades before I developed courage as an actor.