I wasn't campaigning for a role in a Hollywood television series, it was a fluke. So you've got to have a measure of good luck, you really have, being in the right place at the right time.

I've been an activist all my life. And always a liberal activist, for the simple reason that it is on the liberal left that you find the true recognition for the need for fairness in society. I'm not saying equality, because that you can never achieve, because equality is based on such complex criteria. But fairness is another issue.

The knights of the theater represented to me not only the pinnacle of the profession but the esteem in which the profession was held. To find myself, to my astonishment, in that company is the grandest thing that has professionally happened to me.

When I'm meant to be standing in the wings, the only way to go is the ladies' toilets. It's the only time I've ever acted in the toilets.

Violence is never ever a choice that a man should make.

Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain's ready room died it was always a sad moment.

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.