I wanted to play a mother again. I thought it would be interesting to play the mother of an older child. And it was also the kind of part I've been looking for my whole career, actually, in film. You know, just to play a femme fatale who's very smart, and wicked.

I really enjoy working with younger actors. I just feel like we're all peers together.

What makes these creatures so awful is the feeling that they can use us in ways too horrible to imagine-and yet, we DO imagine them, which makes it worse than seeing it.

I used to be terribly shy, so I was either shy or over the top, and I always had a difficult time.

If one is married for a long time, and one does have a family . . . It is like an energy, a wonderful fire that never goes out underneath you, to help you go out into the world and do your damnedest.

Some of the most intense affairs are between actors and characters. There's a fire in the human heart and we jump into it with the same obsession as we have with our lovers.

After I left Yale, we were all doing these mad plays off - off Broadway. And I got back to that feeling I had from college, of everyone making up in front of one cracked mirror, which is what I loved - the scrappy theater idea. I think off-off Broadway healed me, made me an actor again, and I was in so many different crazy shows.